Hosting on Netlify

I built a small website for my wife's foot health business, For Fabulous Feet. We needed to keep costs to a minimum as it's a small sole-trader business.

The site was built using Gridsome; a Jamstack framework for Vue.js that creates static sites, we also decided to try hosting on Netlify. This works really well as we already owned the domain name which is kept at Clook.

The process was very easy and quick to set up.

• 1. Build the site locally, in the case of Gridsome its useful to add a netlify.toml file to the root of your website as this aids the build process at Netlif, this add code to the file:-

[build]  publish = "dist"  command = "gridsome build"

• 2. Next, create a new Github repository, you will need to create a Github account first if you don't already have one and upload your websites files, I use Github Desktop for this.
• 3. Create a Netlify account and log-in.
• 4. Once logged-in create a new site from your Github repository.
• 5. Select your Github repository using the 'New site from Git' button and let the magic happen.
• 6. If your website is successfully built it will be given a random nelify.app domain name, simply goto the Site Settings and make any changes you require here.
• 7. Go to domain settings and add your domain name, this will then give you DNS values to change at your host.
• 8. That's it you should now have a shiny new website up and running.

If you have a contact form on your website you can use Netlify's in-built form handling processing, the form is built using the html examples provided (this can be modified to suit your needs), Netlify then handles the form submissions, checking for spam, and then emails the form details to any email address, the documentation is easy to follow.

The only drawback that I can see at the moment is email handling, you could use a service such as Forward Email or Improvmx for email forwarding.

All in all, a very simple and cheap way to build and host a website, I recommend giving it a go.