Finished Homepage

December 02, 2024 | Work: 2024-09

This may just be a placeholder. I’m trying to backfill some content that I did not have the time to write in the last quarter of 2024.

Homepage migrated

I took the original homepage design we used on the previous Stillfleet instance (static site) and migrated it over.

It is mostly the same as it was before. The layout of the site is quite a bit different – different menu, different footer.

Getting the colors to be correct was also a challenge, as it uses some weird theme-tie-ins meant to make things “easy” but makes it very difficult if you want to tinker under the hood, because it is so disconnected.

Adding Fonts

We have some fonts that we need to use. This is one of those “non-negotiables” for the company.

Unfortunately, Shopify does not allow you to directly upload and make available any custom fonts through their admin panel.

Instead, I had to upload them as asset files, then reference them directly in the <head> tag. I also had to first convert them to WOFF format.

Adding a homepage “feature component”

I used an existing component for the homepage and extended it. The original one used a lot of nested div tags, but I was able to decrypt what they were trying to do, and then modify the structure and styling to display like we wanted it to.

This was one of those “the generalized solution does everything with mediocrity” and by specializing the purpose of the component and reducing its capabilities, I could make it do a better job of what I needed.

Components require the component HTML snippet, some JSON definitions in both the localizations and also configuration files. Also a separate CSS file that gets included explicitly.