Dec 17, 2021

Introducing My New Blogfolio!

Braydon Coyer

I shipped my new blogfolio! Here’s a glance at what’s new, and some analytics too!

Hi everyone!

This issue is arriving in your inboxes later in the month because as the year comes to a close, I’ve got more things to wrap up at work, and I’ve been working on something in my “downtime.”

As teased in the last issue, I’ve been slowly revamping my portfolio and I’m excited to announce that I released it to the world this week!

✨ Check out my new blogfolio here and have a look around! ✨

There’s a lot that’s new in this rebuild, including:

✅ Notion as a CMS

✅ Article reactions

✅ Automated Open Graph images

✅ Stats page

✅ Intelligent article suggestions

✅ ‘READ’ feature on articles seen

🤔 But why rebuild?

There are a few technical reasons, but a big part of my decision to rebuild stemmed from my continuous desire to learn new things. I treat my domain as an environment for experimentation; an area to promote creativity.

My codebase is ever-evolving and changing. Sometimes things stick around, while other times I realize it’s best not to push something to the public. Regardless of the end result, I always learn something.

I do have a few reasons that are a bit more justifiable:

Gatsby was getting slow.
All of my blog content was sourced from MDX. Notion as a CMS makes things way easier!
I fell in love with Next.js. SSG, SSR & ISR solved a few pain points I was experiencing.

⚙️ The tech stack

I had the opportunity to work with a stack I’ve grown very fond of, and learn new tools and skills at the same time! Here’s a list of the tech stack I used for my blogfolio:

Next.js version 12 (newly released)
Notion as a CMS
Tailwind v3.0 (newly released)
Supabase for article reactions and hit count
Cloudinary for dynamic Open Graph banners
Iconic App icon library
Revue for newsletter subscription and management

📈 The analytics

I use Plausible as my analytics solution - it’s unobtrusive and doesn’t track personal information about visitors on my website.

I expected a small surge of traffic on the day I released my new site - perhaps double the amount of normal daily visitors, and a decreased bounce rate.

The results actually shocked me. Here’s a snapshot of the analytics on the day I released my blogfolio:

Visitors, page views, bounce rate and visit duration for 12/13/2021

Let me break it down really quick:

The unique visitors were up 144%. That’s great, and pretty much what I expected!
The number of page views SKYROCKETED with an increase of 472%! My guess is that this is a result of people wanting to take a look around the entire site, but I also have to assume the new design and UX play a part in it. I spent a lot of time thinking about the end-user when designing the new site. Specifically, how to help direct them to information they would want to see. Time will tell how much the UX helps as more data arrives.
The bounce rate decreased significantly! My normal bounce rate lives somewhere between 77%-84%. It’s not great, but not terrible either. On the day I released my new site, the bounce rate settled at 54%!
The average visit duration was just over 2 minutes! This is a huge win, with previous visitors only averaging 55 seconds on my domain.

And that’s not all - the unique visitor count has increased since launch, and page views remain around 1,700 - 2,000. It’s very exciting, and I can’t wait to see what my analytics look like at the end of the month!

📚️ Want to learn more about my rebuild?

I released a pretty detailed article about my blogfolio rebuild. If you want to get some in-depth insights, feel free to check this out!

Introducing My New Blogfolio - Braydon Coyer

Welcome to my new blogfolio! Here’s a high-level overview of what’s new and a brief snippet on why I decided to rebuild.

braydoncoyer.dev

👀 About the next issue...

I’ve got some pretty exciting news to share in my next issue coming in January - keep an eye out!

🙌 Wrapping up

That’s all for this month’s newsletter!

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and New Year!

Braydon

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Braydon Coyer @BraydonCoyer

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