Choosing the platform
Most of my work is building sites with a CMS (usually WordPress) for clients this way they can use it with no technical expertise, but I have technical expertise and with that in mind I decided a static site would more than meet my needs.
Knowing I'd be writing blog posts I realised managing everything would quickly get confusing and messy so I opted for a static site generator so it could be a templated system, also I wanted to learn something new and use a platform I've never even touched before.
I've seen eleventy talked about a lot online so decided it would be perfect to use for this project as I've not used it before and gave me an opportunity to learn something new.
Setting up the site
For me this stage took the longest, it took me a bit of time to get my head around how it all works and getting specifics working like SASS and copying the image directory into the published site.
Those issues were easy to overcome though, because eleventy is popular there's plenty of posts online to use to fix your issues and the documentation is extensive.
Soon I was up and running with my local environment and getting stuck into the development.
Working with templating
I love the templating system, being able to define values within one file and then choosing where to show them in the base template for that file was so useful, it's probably old news to most people reading but I'd never used it before so cut me some slack.
Being able to use multiple different file extensions and it compiling it all into html without a hitch is brilliant, for my complex pages I'm using nunjucks so I can have full control over everything and blog posts and just markdown files, meaning I can copy everything in from anywhere and can write them on mobile devices if need be.
Working with eleventy has been a great learning experience and has helped me to realise how powerful static site generators are, being able to use markdown in eleventy opens it up as a viable option for clients, particularly if it's linked up with something like Netlify CMS, I'll definitely be using it again in the future and would recommend it to others.
