This project involved designing and developing a website for Peabody's Wine & Beer Merchants in Boone, NC. The website that the business had been using previously was built on outdated technologies and was not performant, which is a big issue in Boone where cell reception can be spotty. In addition, there was no content management system (CMS) integration, leaving the managers to attempt to make changes to the raw HTML files themselves.

My goal with this project was threefold. The site needed to be fast and highly performant, it needed to be easily updatable, and it needed to be built on modern technologies. I chose to use GatsbyJS, a static site generator that harnesses the power of the JAMstack (Javascript, APIs, and Markup). This allowed me to pull in data from multiple sources: Instagram, Untappd, and a self-hosted content management system powered by NetlifyCMS.

By leveraging the speed of the JAMstack as well as Gatsby's native image processing I was able to increase the Lighthouse scores for the website tremendously—and by hosting the site on Netlify's content distribution network, Peabody's will avoid paying hosting fees on the site while actually increasing their SEO.

Another feature that was needed on the website was the ability to convert an Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of wines into a single page ordering form with all the wines listed, along with price and critic reviews. When restaurants closed for dining at the start of the COVID lockdowns, wine distributors began sending out these spreadsheets to bottle shops in hopes of gaining back some revenue. It was not feasible to simply pass these massive documents onto the clients, so an elegant solution was necessary.

I wrote a script that would take these spreadsheets and populate a webpage with all the wines, separated by country, and further by region. This creates a much more pleasant user experience than having to navigate through hundreds of wine listings in a spreadsheet.

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