Complete: PhraseRanker
This last month I designed, built, and deployed phraseranker.com.
Here's some nice stats for the state of the project's codebase as of now, in lines of code:
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Language files comment code
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Svelte 18 7 1150
JavaScript 8 40 362
JSON 3 0 68
CSS 1 0 59
YAML 2 0 47
Markdown 1 0 26
HTML 1 10 19
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SUM: 34 57 1731
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The goal of Twelve Websites is to learn about simplicity. Thus far, I've learned (predictably) that simplicity is hard. A tiny little website like this takes quite a bit of effort to get to the level of polish that I like. I had most of the functionality done in the first week, but all the layout, tweaking of buttons, positions, little interactions, mobile formatting, and so on took quite a while. This is the part of the process I tend to get a bit caught up in making as nice as possible; I need to work on powering though it a bit faster.
Overall, a good process. I ended up spending more than the 25 hours I had anticipated (probably about 35 total), but I enjoyed it so it was all well spent.
For PhraseRanker I took a bit of an unusual (for me) approach to the interface style, going for a retro brutalist classic MacOS type thing. I had a ton of fun figuring out how to make everything fit well, and I employed some new little microinteractions like the dropdown menu to switch between rank types. This kind of exploration is another one of the big goals for Twelve Websites; I'd love to expand my style beyond the very minimal approach I tend to prefer and go out there a bit with these designs.
Another aspect of this project I'm now starting to more seriously think about is cost. I bought the phraseranker.com domain for $9, and am hosting the site on one of my $5/month virtual machines. If every one of the next eleven projects has its own domain and isn't just a static site, it could start to get a bit expensive. I'll need to consider this a bit as I plan out the next sites.