Tanner Byers

Building my consulting site

learningconsulting

Introduction

Building a landing page is one of the first steps to establishing an online presence for any business. For my tech consulting business, the goal was to create a simple, cost-effective, and professional site that could grow with my needs (currently 0 but can grow to atleast 1000's of requests). Here's how I approached selecting the tech stack, deployment strategy, and management process.

Defining the Requirements

Before choosing the tech stack, I outlined the primary requirements:

  • Accessible: This is a priority for me as someone who builds tech every day. Color contrast, simple design, keyboard navigatable, sound-off design.
  • Performance: Fast load times for better user experience and SEO. We're going for under 1 second but we'll optimize throughout as needed.
  • Scalability: Handle traffic growth with minimal adjustments. Big on the minimal adjustments. I dont want to mess with any UI's other than allowing certain charge thresholds to be allowed, which shouldn't happen with only 1000's of site visitors on a static site (ty caching).
  • Mobile-First Design: Optimized for all screen sizes. This is a must for any public facing site.
  • Cost-Effectiveness: Affordable yet robust solutions. No brainer for landing page site.
  • Integration: Compatibility with analytics and marketing tools. Although I highly value priacy, a website without analytics is a personal site. If you're running a business, you must know your customers, BUT only as much as they reasonably woud like to share. I like to track # of visits, locale of visitor, duration on page, & CTA clicked.
  • Enjoyable Development Feedback: I wanted development be simple and the time from deploy to updated content to be fast and update cache

Choosing the Tech Stack

Development & Deploy

  • Decision: Store code in github with github actions to deploy terraform to AWS for S3 hosting and cloudfront for caching.
  • Reasoning:
    • AWS is my preferred compute and storage provider and the services used should be fast and within free tier.

Frontend

  • Decision: Gatsby.
  • Reasoning:
    • Usually would pick HTML for landing page but I have a lot of accessibility and integrations I would like to use and not a lot of time so I decided to go with Gatsby due to it's huge plugin support.

Hosting

  • Decision: AWS S3 + CloudFront
  • Reasoning:
    • Scalable and low-cost distribution with caching and auditing, included.

Security Considerations

  • Ensuring HTTPS with CloudFront.
  • IAM policies for managing access during deployment.
  • Audit log and live monitoring for all interactions with infrastructure and exceeding performance, error & cost thresholds.

Will add architecture diagrams soon

Analytics Integration

  • Posthog looks really cool so I'll be trying it for monitoring performance and user traits.

Future Scalability

  • Gatsby support makes it easy to extend this in many directions (blogging or maybe authentication)!

Conclusion

A thoughtfully designed tech stack and deployment strategy are critical for any project, especially for a business landing page. This approach ensures scalability, performance, and maintainability, aligning with the needs of a growing consulting business.

Want to dive deeper into building scalable solutions or explore how AI can accelerate your development? Check out my related posts or reach out for consulting services!