🎃 Each October my friends and I spend the month indulging in horror movies and pumpkin carving. Though the quarantine has kept everyone physically apart this year, the spirit is still with us. This October I took it upon myself to host a streaming movie marathon for them each week so we can continue to revel in the atmosphere of the season together.
It crossed my mind to put together a PDF to announce the schedule of screenings but I ultimately decided that this would be a great opportunity to build a simple site my friends could easily check for updates and show times. Though the scope of the site is small and simple, there were still quite a few lessons learned along the way:
Sometimes A Library Is Just Clutter
I began building my site with the intention of learning how to use Bootstrap for rapid styling. Once the general layout of the site was completed I realized hardly any of the massive library the browser had been forced to download was being utilized. Here I made the decision to ditch Bootstrap and focus on using CSS3 Flexbox to achieve my responsive design goals without the bloat. Bootstrap, I'll call on you later for a future project.
Manage Your Media Assets
My site includes a number of film poster images and the required download size grew to well over 8MB which introduced a noticeable delay on page load. Using a free photo editor I was able to reduce the total download size for the entire page to just over 1MB by resizing all of my images. This reduces the amount of data mobile-users have to download and resolved my delayed page load.
Build Fun Projects
Small, silly projects like this are great practice for those that may be reluctant to touch CSS or front end development. You don't have to jump into a monolithic project to learn something big. What I thought was going to be a one or two hour project turned into multiple days of tweaking wireframes, layouts, assets, and color palettes as I became more determined to make this as polished as possible. Building something that is going to be used by your friends is also a great project motivator!
Overall, I had a lot of fun building this site and hope this leads to a Live-Screaming Horror Picture Show 2021! Let me know if you have any Halloween favorites I should have included in the schedule, and have a wonderful October! 🎃
🕸️ Site Link: https://skylerburger.github.io/lshps/
TL;DR
1) Don't feel like you have to use a library unless you have good reason to
2) Manage the file sizes for your media assets
3) Build more small, silly projects!
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