New Website - Luke Larsen

New Website!

John Dilworth was a professor of mine in college. He once told me to always keep an updated portfolio. My website had not been updated in quite some time, so I set out to give it a refresh. I did the design work over a year ago but never got around to building it.

Page Transitions

I designed the site to have small page transitions between pages. At the time, I had no idea how that could be accomplished. I'm glad I never got around to building this website until now because I don't think I could have used the transition library called Swup. I stumbled upon it when researching how to do modern page transitions. It's dead simple to get some page transitions going using CSS. I found I needed some more control over the page transitions, so I went with the javascript version of Swup. Using the javascript Swup plugin also let me use Green Sock to make things smooth.

Static Site Generator 11ty

I knew I wanted to build a static site and not use some CMS. I tested a few static site generators out. I found 11ty to be easy to use and powerful enough to allow me to do what I wanted with this website. The templating was easy for me to understand. I'm using Nunjucks for the templating. One thing I knew I needed to handle well was images. I have a large hero image at the top of each page and portfolio images for each project. Serving the correct image size for different devices was going to get complicated. I knew I wanted to use theelement, but I didn't want to set it up separately for each image. Luckily 11ty has an image plugin that will do all this for me. I use the top sample in my templates and the bottom code sample gets rendered.

{% headerimage intro.image, intro.imageAlt, "100vw" %}

<picture>
    <source type="image/webp" srcset="/img/b7d66153-300.webp 300w, /img/b7d66153-600.webp 600w, /img/b7d66153-900.webp 900w, /img/b7d66153-1200.webp 1200w, /img/b7d66153-1800.webp 1800w, /img/b7d66153-2000.webp 2000w, /img/b7d66153-3500.webp 3500w" sizes="100vw">
    <source type="image/jpeg" srcset="/img/b7d66153-300.jpeg 300w, /img/b7d66153-600.jpeg 600w, /img/b7d66153-900.jpeg 900w, /img/b7d66153-1200.jpeg 1200w, /img/b7d66153-1800.jpeg 1800w, /img/b7d66153-2000.jpeg 2000w, /img/b7d66153-3500.jpeg 3500w" sizes="100vw">
    <img alt="Luke Larsen UX + Front End" loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/img/b7d66153-300.jpeg" width="3500" height="2517">
</picture>

Lighthouse Score

Lighthouse is a service that will rate a website on performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. I worked hard to get this score up. Yay!

Lighthouse Score

Huzzah!

Blog

I have a good amount of posts I need to bring over. I hope to do that over time.