Building Essentur's New Website
From AI-Generated Foundation to Full-Stack Implementation. Our first host on cloudfare! Built it from ground up!
When we decided to move away from Ghost and create our own site, we knew it would be a challenge, but also a great opportunity to show off our technical skills. Here's how we built essentur.com from the ground up in just a week.
The Foundation
We started with bolt.new, an AI-powered web application builder, to establish our basic design structure. This gave us a solid foundation to build upon, allowing us to focus on the unique aspects of our site rather than starting completely from scratch. While the AI provided the initial scaffolding, we fine-tuned every component to match our vision and requirements.
Technical Stack
Our target was to built our site with a modern tech stack that prioritizes performance and user experience. Here’s our toolstack:
React with TypeScript for type-safe, component-based development
Vite as our build tool for lightning-fast development and optimized production builds
Tailwind CSS for responsive, utility-first styling
Framer Motion for smooth animations
The Cloudflare Migration Challenge
Moving our DNS from GoDaddy to Cloudflare was an interesting experience. Coming from platforms like Framer and Ghost, where hosting was handled through simple setting toggles, dealing with DNS records and deployment configurations was a significant shift.
The migration involved several failed attempts and taught us valuable lessons about:
DNS propagation and management
SSL certificate configuration, and
Domain verification processes
The end result was worth it as our migration to Cloudflare came with some goodies:
Robust analytics for tracking site performance and user behaviour
Advanced security features DDoS protection, and
Generous free tier that includes essential features
Post-Launch Improvements
After launch, we realized we needed to add metadata for better social sharing. We quickly added Open Graph tags and X Card metadata to make sure our site looks good when shared on different platforms.
Breaking Free from CMS Constraints
Moving from Ghost to our custom solution wasn't just about saving on subscription costs. It was a strategic decision to showcase our ability to build and maintain complex web applications. By developing our own platform, we gained:
Freedom to implement custom features
Direct access to performance optimization, and
The ability to rapidly iterate based on user feedback/analytics
AI-Paired Development: A New Standard
Building essentur showed us how powerful combining AI tools with human expertise can be. Using an AI-generated foundation helped us speed up the initial development, and our technical skills let us customize and expand it the way we wanted.
The hybrid AI-paired approach redefines the development landscape: AI handles the 80% of traditional technical implementation work and the developer oversights the important remaining 20% of planning, design, and strategic problem-solving.
The only limitations are Vision & Creativity.
Let’s Connect!
💼 LinkedIn: alex-kazos
👨🏻💻 GitHub: alex-kazos
Learning to build your own web application has so many benefits as well as teaching you to problem-solve and make informed decisions about technology and your business that you would never have thought about when using a CMS.
These skills I find are invaluable and it’s the experience and the journey that leads you to a different place, something that I’ve experienced having built web applications. Thank you for sharing it’s inspiring!
Thank you for sharing the journey, and honesty particularly when facing clients and telling them that "hey we have built our own custom web app". Curious to know what whete the reasons behind choosing Ghost initially, instead of another platform (e.g. Framer)?