Our website, including this blog was built on GatsbyJS. It took us about 10-15 minutes to deploy the website and the rest of the time we were fixing the content for the website. So we thought, why not kickstart our blog aka inbound marketing, with GatsbyJS (hopefully, there is better content after this 🤞).

What is GatsbyJS?

GatsbyJS is a site generator for React.

Everyone: What is a static site generator?

In the early days of the web, people used to build their websites in HTML, CSS and JS (yep!), and you could open these pages directly from your file system.

Everyone: So, why did we abandon these gold nuggets?

Well, not everyone is as enthusiastic as us to build sites from scratch. Now consider, each time you had to write a blog and you had to rewrite the same code over and over again…was pretty annoying and people wanted a quick go to solution to get over this problem.

Content Management System has entered the chat

With the rise of CMS like Wordpress, you didn’t have to worry about the technical details you could change the design, layout on how your website looked with a few clicks.

Everyone: So, why are we bringing back this site generator?

Good question.

Why are we using GatsbyJS?

Considering our own case:

From the perspective of a user: we are addicted to performance, great design and giving our readers/visitors a great experience.

From a technical perspective: We love React.js (duh!). Our team, always wants to update some text on the fly and so we wanted a solution to update really quickly, so we wanted quick deployment with each commit. In addition to that, for the blog we wanted to use Markdown (aka real programmers 🙈).

Turns out, GatsbyJS is the perfect solution that we are looking for.

They support Markdown! 😍 They have Netlify, with which you can deploy with each commit. They use React 🥰

Everyone: What else can GatsbyJS do?

If you observe the image, where we described how GatsbyJS works, you can observe that you can use Data (APIs, Databases etc.,). So you definitely can build web apps using GatsbyJS. For this blog we are limiting to a static website

(Share this article if you want that!) continuing…

Let’s Build!

Templates: GatsbyJS has a very good set of templates. That you can check here https://www.gatsbyjs.org/starters/. Everyone: That’s cheating!. Totally! For our use case, we have picked this. It’s a portfolio template and the demo looks pretty slick. Now, let’s deploy

If you see

there is an option on the gatsby page to deploy to Netlify directly, we are going to use that.

If you have a Netlify account kudos!. If not, no problem! Netlify has a free option. Allow Netlify to use your gitlab or other git account. In a while, Netlify should be deploying your website. Now, if you check your git account there should a repository of your website. Pull it locally and make any required changes as you would like to in the content. Tada!. Done in less than an hour and now every time you push any changes on the master branch, Netlify will handle deploying your website.

That’s it folks!

Do tag us on twitter with your works. If you need any help, you can always remember us.