Christopher Wray

What e-commerce platform or framework are you using?

A lot of this depends on what your infrastructure already supports. Either of the options are a great choice so it comes down to what will be easiest to integrate and which search service is most affordable.

Elastic search is open source but you will need to configure and maintain it on your server. It may be more difficult to set up depending on the platform your app is built on.

Algolia has great documentation and is normally pretty easy to integrate but it can be pretty expensive.

I've never used Typsense but it seems like it would be a great option as well.

Hey there, Definitely install Git. Git is the open source version control system that both GitHub and GitLab interface with. Git is extremely important as a new developer to learn, and once you do, you will be so thankful you are tracking your projects in it. Git makes it super easy to track changes you make in your code, and even rollback, edit, view, or delete changes you made months before. In software development, it is a crucial skill to learn.

GitHub and GitLab are online cloud Git repositories. They are for backing up your repos in the cloud, and working with other developers, or even working with yourself via other devices. I would recommend starting with GitHub since you are a new developer. Companies will want to see your GitHub when you start applying to jobs, and having one will be a great plus going for you. It also is the most widely used by developers and most open source projects are hosted on GitHub.

Here is a course on Codecademy to start learning: https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-git

Hope this helps! Good luck!

How do you know that your Mailchimp emails are going to junk? Are you getting that assumption from the open rate?

One thing you should ensure is that you have added the Mailchimp SPF records and DKIM records for your domain.

Another thing to know, Mandrill is for transactional type emails: Order confirmations, etc. I would need to read the terms of use, but using it for blanket email campaigns probably isn't allowed.

For more information on avoiding spam filters with Mailchimp check out their guide here.

By the way, I run a couple email accounts and have around a 67% open rate for one, and 90% open rate for the other, so simply adding SPF records and DKIM records should help. Also, don't email people too much.

Tailwind is being used on a lot of large websites and is a great option.

That being said, make sure you compile and purge assets, as stated in tailwind docs, or, no, it will not perform well at all.

I love Nuxt. I'm using it for my own personal portfolio site, and as soon as I get the chance, I'm going to be utilizing it for a few of my clients site's as well as my own company's website.

As already mentioned, Nuxt is super easy to configure to build statically. The great thing about this is that api calls will all be made on the backend when your site is being built when content is released.

One thing that I recommend using a webhook to build your site statically each time content is updated in the CMS. In Netlify, these are called "build hooks", and pretty incredible to integrate.

I recommend checking out Algolia.

They have a very affordable entry-level plan and even a small, free level plan for new websites.

Their JavaScript API is pretty simple to implement as well.

I’d be happy to help set this up for you if you would like some help. I am booked through middle of February but I open up later next month.

For my personal developer website, I chose Netlify for the static site pages for the ease of use and deployments. In their free plan, they provide up to 100gb of bandwidth per month, custom domains, SSL, and much more. So far, I am super happy with the results.

For the backend API, I am using Heroku, because I am statically generating the site, and I don't need my server to be running all the time. For this, I could use their free plan as well! It has worked wonderfully, and running deployments is easy. They even have deployment paths so that you can release staging sites, and easily configure zero-downtime deployments.

The database is on MongoDB Atlas. I am using their free plan as well! I don't have a lot of experience with MongoDB, but there were a lot of tutorials online to help with the release and set up, which made it pretty straight forward.

Images are hosted on Cloudinary, and once again, I was able to utilize their free plan for this! Since I am using Strapi for the API/CMS, I was easily able to configure a plugin that connected to Cloudinary for hosting images uploaded.

In total, everything is hosted for free, and I am super happy with the results. Feel free to check out the site here.

I am not sure if I can recommend one or the other without knowing your exact needs and what plugins you are using. Is this just a company publicity website, or more of a web application with login functionality and a store?

But, Sharepoint doesn't seem like the best solution in my point of view for a public-facing website.

When I first released NurseryPeople, a website to help landscapers find plants from wholesale plant suppliers, I provisioned everything myself and set up the CI/CD with Buddy. Eventually, I decided that I wanted to integrate zero-downtime deployments, and so I decided that I would use Envoyer.

So far, I have really liked how Envoyer handles the deployments completely and the costs were lower for the number of deployments I was doing each month.

Hey there, so if you go with React Native, you are going to need something to serve the data and run the backend, so there is no reason why you couldn't build the website with Laravel, and the backend API for the React Native application with Laravel as well.

But, if you are only wanting a website first, then you will need to go with a web framework and if you have Laravel experience then I would definitely recommend that.

If you are only wanting to build a mobile app, then you will use React Native coupled with a backend API and you could build that with Laravel.

Either way, stick with laravel for the backend if you already have experience with it. (: