Konbini Development Log #2 - We have a website!
This is something I mentioned wanting to do in my last post, so I spent some time putting it together today -- usekonbini.com is now a very barebones "coming soon" page with an email form.
I don't plan on spending any time doing marketing in the near future, so I don't really expect to get many subscribers this way, but it still feels good to actually have something up on that domain that I can link people to.
One thing this has reminded me of is that, if you're a frontend dev (or at least someone who knows their way around HTML), the widespread advice to always always go with a batteries-included product like Webflow or WordPress instead of doing something like building your own marketing site may not really apply.
This is something I realized when I was putting together Bulletproof PHP, my last little project -- if you already write code for the web every day, getting a generic platform to do what you want could very well end up taking more time and effort than it would've taken to just build it yourself in the first place.
For Bulletproof PHP, I spent a few days trying to get a few different platforms to work for me, but in the end I just sat down and wrote a Next.js site in a couple of hours, and I was way happier with it than any of the other stuff I'd been playing around with, too. Don't be afraid to just build your own thing if you're reasonably sure you can get something out quickly and won't get stuck bikeshedding or on weird technical issues.
I will say that I didn't build the design for this page (or for Bulletproof PHP, for that matter) from scratch -- I used Tailwind UI, which I bought a while ago and am a big fan of. It's beginning to lose its novelty a bit as more and more sites clearly built with the same components pop up, but it's still a collection of incredibly well-designed components, and the fact that it's a "plain HTML" component library built on top of Tailwind CSS makes it super easy to integrate into any stack.
