Recipe Blog

Background

This website is a project I took on for a business looking to revamp their existing website. They were looking to expand their WordPress site to reach a larger audience, increase monetization, etc. As I have never worked in WordPress and am generally not interested in developing with it, I decided to build a new site from the ground up.

The Project

I decided to use Next.js as the framework for this site. As for the CMS, I considered keeping WordPress as a headless CMS, but decided to use this as an opportunity to explore new platforms. After some research, I landed on Sanity and that would be my backend content provider.

What makes Sanity different from another option like Strapi, is that it lives within the Next.js application, having its own route for content management, rather than being decoupled entirely. The content manager, referred to as "studio", is also highly customizable, which allows you to really deliver bespoke and streamlined workflows for the editors. That is what really drew me to it — I wanted the experience for the editors to be as intuitive and tailored to their workflow as possible.

In addition to the CMS, the website also has a storefront for selling various products and services. For this, I integrated Shopify headless via their Storefront API. This was my first time working with Shopify and it was fairly straight forward. Their documentation is very clear and community support abundant.

This was a fun project and I learned a lot while building it, including important SEO optimizations via JSON-LD and integrating Google Analytics. Though I may have lost my sanity a few times, I would definitely choose Sanity as a CMS again, but of course it depends on the project, and I will continue to explore and learn new technologies.

Check out the website with this live demo.

View the code on Github.