After nearly 4 years of using 11ty as my static site generator, I decided to bite the bullet and give Next.js a try.
The 11ty site I had been using was originally a portfolio starter template by Piper Haywood and Sam Baldwin, the former who was kind enough to talk to me in 2020 and gave me advice on how to get started with web work as a complete newbie.
I have been using Next for a number of products that we have been building at work, so felt comfortable enough to give it a try for this site rewrite. The flexibility offered by Next and React is what got me interested in the first place. My original website wasn't particularly feature-rich or complicated to begin with, so it wouldn't be too difficult to try recreate this.
Having migrated all of my content and work across, the site feels noticeable faster compared to 11ty. While 11ty build times are still much, much faster by comparison, this doesn't really affect the end user experience. Vercel takes care of the deployment, and next/image ensures that all of my images are optimised when they are sent to the viewer which is awesome.
In the future, I want to expand the functionality of this site by creating more custom components and libraries. For example, all of the Are.na channels that I have are being rendered as iframes, so it would be great if I could leverage something like arena-ts so that this loads natively with proper image optimisation. Since iframes aren't particularly accessible and are difficult to navigate using a keyboard, this would be a big plus as well.
If you're interested in seeing the code, feel free to take a look on my GitHub.