Anyone who has used JavaScript and TypeScript will be glad this design decision was made. Little more need be said.
The website is built with Next.js, a React framework which provides a number of utilities that make development simpler and a number of optimizations to improve user experience and SEO.
The organization of code follows a structure a typical when using Next.js. Routes to pages are defined in the pages directory and React components are found in the components directory, where they can be used in multiple pages.
The website uses the Material UI CSS framework to simplify the design of the website. MUI provides a baseline for many common components like buttons, headers, or navigation bars that we can then easily build on.
The theme for the website can be found in styles/theme.ts. A monochromatic palette was chosen simply because Manuel is no great UI designer and wished to keep things simple.
As a side note, to have MUI CSS generated server-side in Next.js, changes were made to the _app.tsx and _document.tsx as can be found in tutorials online.
- Install Node.js version 18.x.x
- Clone this repo
- From the root of this repo, run
npm install
To run a local server, use the command npm run dev. The server will run on port 3000, and can be accessed in the browser through localhost:3000 or 127.0.0.1:3000. After the server is ran, any changes made to a file will, after saving, be automatically updated on the server.
When testing peformance or determining SEO metrics, it is not recommended to use the development server. Instead, to get a more accurate analysis, you should first use npm run build to build static pages locally, and then use npm run start to launch the server. Note that in this case, any changes made to files will not automatically be visible on the webiste; you will have to rebuild and restart the server.
We use Vercel for hosting. Because this company developed and maintains Next.js, their deployment service integrates smoothly with Next.js projects.
The deployment information for this website can be found here. You will need to log in with gtmrobotics@gmail.com.
The deployment is linked to this GitHub repo. That means any change to the main branch of this repo will result in a new production deployment. Also, any changes to a different branch will be deployed to a junk url, so you can see those changes online as well. Note that our payment tier (the free hobby tier) does not support using repos from a GitHub org; as a result, this repo is not in the GT MRG GitHub org.
The gt-mrg.org domain costs $20 per year. Please ensure that the credit card associated with the Vercel account is of a current org member. The domain is set to auto-renew on September 25.