VelkaDomu.cz - A football community

At the start of November 2020 I joined with my classmate to create our own website, where we could present our own football news. My concern was the technical side of things, his job was marketing and getting authors. The main aim of this project was getting a large audience for who we would be the main source of football news, to earn valuable experience from the area of business and to try working in a team.

My job was to create a web app from top to bottom including design, back-end and front-end. I programmed two versions, one for a usual reader, the second for writers, which includes creating an ediotrial system anda text processor. Responsivness was a necessity.

In the span of four months I delivered a fully functional responsive webapp optimalized for SEO including an interface for editors and an advanced text editor.

The design doesn't overwhelm the reader, since it only shows four articels upon arival. It only presents other, less important, informations lower including other actual articles. After we consulted it with other poeple, we decided to choose the latter vesion due to this arguments:

The site has clearly stated the most distinctive elements, thanks to which the user knows where to look. The design is memorable and easily sticks in the user's memory. Despite the former points, the design is still clear and without screamy elements.

At first, the programming of the editorial system came up. This process split to two main problems: the text editor a articles managment. When I created the text-editor, I could've gone for the classic out-of-the-box WYSIWYG solution. But one of the targets of this projects was learning, so I decided to code up my own block-based text editor. Its basic demo can be found here.

The editor in its final form automatically saves the work of editors and after they are finished, the result is transformed into HTML in back-end. Once the editor was done, it was trivial to make the other things visually appealing create a table with all the articles and to program other features.

To be the only full-stack developer of such big project is not as easy as it seems. For the first time in my life have I tried working in a team, where a lot of other people depend on me and I can't possibly fail. Even though I was the only person involved in the technical side of thing, I managed to create it all without bigger problems and I received experience from all corners of development.

During the course of the project, we consulted everything mainly among four eyes and even in the smallest possible team, we sometimes couldn't agree on some things. That was new for me, because before, I could do everything on my own.

I created project of such size for the first time, that's why many functions were experimenting and examining, how the things work. I assumed, that once everything will be done, I will only add support for sharing articles on social media. Then I found out, that you can't really do that with Svelte and that you have to use server-side rendering. So it took a while to rewrite everything.