Now that the Traffic site is finally finished (yay!) and the dust has settled, we feel its only fair to write a wee post about what cool stuff we used to build our lovely new site.
From a front-end perspective (beware of the geek chat) there are currently lots and of cool tools and frameworks that one may use in helping with their development workflow. Examples include Yeoman, Grunt, Bower, Gulp, Sass, Bootstrap and Foundation to name a few. These tools and frameworks ultimately make your job easier and allow you to create standard websites with minimum effort. Speed is of the essence in a developers world and if you can streamline processes and improve efficiency then these tools are an important part of any developers arsenal.
For the new Traffic website we wanted our Journal section to become a focal part to our new online presence; We love design and we want to write about it. The easy choice for us then was to use a customised build of WordPress. It has enough flexibility to help showcase our work but also provide us with the correct tools for our journal.
Do a quick internet search and you will find a variety of customised WordPress starter themes available to kick start your project. For our particular purposes we used Eddie Machado’s Bones theme which you can find here. It’s described as a “HTML5, Mobile-First starter theme for rapid WordPress development”.
We also used Gulp.js as our preferred task runner during development. It’s seen as a newcomer compared to the ever reliable Grunt but has a few advantages particularly on speed. It’s essentially a node.js based task runner than can help concatenate javascript files, preprocess Sass into css, minify js & css and compress pngs to name but a few. For all you non-techies all you need to know is that it makes life much easier when building websites.
For an interesting post about gulp check on this article on sitepoint