Smithfield Chamber of Commerce

The Smithfield Chamber of Commerce is a group of companies in and around Smithfield, Utah who come together to raise money for the community. They have a golf tournament to help support local elementary schools, an Easter egg hunt for all the kids in the community, and a Christmas auction to help families in need.

I had heard about the chamber of commerce from a neighbor who was handling their website. He was currently managing the site, but wasn’t a web developer, so it was a little out of his comfort zone. After some discussion with the chamber, I decided to take on managing the site. The main reason why I wanted to work on the website was because I had a lot of professional experience developing websites, but not much freelance experience. This was also a nice site that I could use as an experiment. There are a few technologies that interested me at the time that I wanted to try out. This seemed like a really good fit.

With a short list of requirements I got right to work. I started out doing a mockup of how the site would work using Adobe XD. With a quick prototype and a brief presentation ready I shared my design with my point of contact and got that approved. I started developing the site using Eleventy as my static site generator, using Nunjucks as my templating language, and a customized template using Sass and Bootstrap. There were a few cases that I needed to use Vue to template out some content, and I found a way to make that work with Nunjucks.

One big part of the site that I needed to figure out was adding in meeting minutes to the site. After looking at a few options I decided that it would be easier going down the Markdown route. Adding in the markdown content made it very easy to update the website every month.

We quickly got the new website launched using Firebase hosting. The Smithfield Chamber of Commerce has been very happy with a professional quality website that users can come and quickly find information about the events going on. I have personally found it very fulfilling to support a group that cares for the community while being able to continually play around with some new ideas and technology.

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