Christopher Wray

Hey there, Definitely install Git. Git is the open source version control system that both GitHub and GitLab interface with. Git is extremely important as a new developer to learn, and once you do, you will be so thankful you are tracking your projects in it. Git makes it super easy to track changes you make in your code, and even rollback, edit, view, or delete changes you made months before. In software development, it is a crucial skill to learn.

GitHub and GitLab are online cloud Git repositories. They are for backing up your repos in the cloud, and working with other developers, or even working with yourself via other devices. I would recommend starting with GitHub since you are a new developer. Companies will want to see your GitHub when you start applying to jobs, and having one will be a great plus going for you. It also is the most widely used by developers and most open source projects are hosted on GitHub.

Here is a course on Codecademy to start learning: https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-git

Hope this helps! Good luck!

This week, we finally released NurseryPeople.com. In the end, I chose to provision our server on DigitalOcean. So far, I am SO happy with that decision. Although setting everything up was a challenge, and I learned a lot, DigitalOceans blogs helped in so many ways. I was able to set up nginx and the Laravel web app pretty smoothly. I am also using Buddy for deploying changes made in git, which is super awesome. All I have to do in order to deploy is push my code to my private repo, and buddy transfers everything over to DigitalOcean. So far, we haven't had any downtime and DigitalOceans prices are quite fair for the power under the hood.

For my personal developer website, I chose Netlify for the static site pages for the ease of use and deployments. In their free plan, they provide up to 100gb of bandwidth per month, custom domains, SSL, and much more. So far, I am super happy with the results.

For the backend API, I am using Heroku, because I am statically generating the site, and I don't need my server to be running all the time. For this, I could use their free plan as well! It has worked wonderfully, and running deployments is easy. They even have deployment paths so that you can release staging sites, and easily configure zero-downtime deployments.

The database is on MongoDB Atlas. I am using their free plan as well! I don't have a lot of experience with MongoDB, but there were a lot of tutorials online to help with the release and set up, which made it pretty straight forward.

Images are hosted on Cloudinary, and once again, I was able to utilize their free plan for this! Since I am using Strapi for the API/CMS, I was easily able to configure a plugin that connected to Cloudinary for hosting images uploaded.

In total, everything is hosted for free, and I am super happy with the results. Feel free to check out the site here.

For our company website and for most simple company sites, we have chosen the Webflow CMS over Wordpress. We have many reasons for this, but a couple are security, updates, ease of use, and ease of customization. Many times, a customer will ask for a simple design change, or feature, that with Wordpress is difficult to maintain, and accomplish. With the cms set up with Webflow, we are easily able to make changes. Another huge benefit of Webflow over Wordpress is the ease of use for our customers. Webflows editor makes it easy to keep design separated from content, while also making it very easy for customers to make edits to their website. We are very happy with Webflow, although there are some features it lacks in a cms, it is a perfect fit for most publicity/marketing websites as well as small to medium sized blogs.

Hey, I have found Laravel to be a great first web framework for me. Mainly, I would look at what you want to build, and go with the framework that will help you get there. It is not about learning a certain framework, but about building apps that help people solve problems. So you should start with a small project that helps people, and find a framework that can help you build that.

I am sure that others will disagree, but this is my opinion.

Hi Whitney, I would recommend using Webflow to design the marketing website, and use Laravel for the customer portal. You can also use Webflow for the design of the customer portal area, but as far as the marketing goes, I would keep your marketing site separate from your customer app, as you won't want marketing people to have access to customer info easily, and you will want to separate concerns to keep things easy to manage.

Your desire for employees to easily update site content is easy to do with Webflow, and will be the best cms for the marketing side.

Reason why I recommend Laravel for the customer app, is that it is secure, highly scalable, well designed, and you will easily find people to help with future development of the site.

If you would like help with any of this, I would be happy to help. I have a small web development and design company.

I recommend checking out Algolia.

They have a very affordable entry-level plan and even a small, free level plan for new websites.

Their JavaScript API is pretty simple to implement as well.

I’d be happy to help set this up for you if you would like some help. I am booked through middle of February but I open up later next month.

When I started on this project as the sole developer, I was new to web development and I was looking at all of the web frameworks available for the job. I had some experience with Ruby on Rails and I had looked into .net for a bit, but when I found Laravel, it felt like the best framework for me to get the product to market. What made me choose Laravel was the easy to read documentation and active community. Rails had great documentation, but lacked some features built in that I wanted out of the box, while .net had a ton of video documentation tutorials, but nothing as straightforward as Laravels. So far, I am happy with the decision I made, and looking forward to the website release!

Hey there! I admire you because I was in your shoes about 3 years ago. Congrats at having a dream and wanting to do it. That is awesome. Keep going.

Personally, I wouldn't recommend trying to do this on a no-code platform. I would use webflow for the design, and building of the html, and css, but then I would build your rating/review/forum platform on Laravel.

Laravel simplifies the application process and there are a ton of resources out there that can help you with development and learning the basics.

No matter what, you will have to learn some code for this project if you want to pull it off. In my opinion, setting up your project on a great web framework will set it up for success, especially if your app is used by a lot of people.

If you set it up on bubble or webflow, and then you get a lot of users, you are going to have to move to a web framework. Taking the hard road now will save you a lot later in the long run.

I just happened to write a blog about this very thing this morning, which is linked below.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or if you would like help with this! and good luck!

Hey there, so if you go with React Native, you are going to need something to serve the data and run the backend, so there is no reason why you couldn't build the website with Laravel, and the backend API for the React Native application with Laravel as well.

But, if you are only wanting a website first, then you will need to go with a web framework and if you have Laravel experience then I would definitely recommend that.

If you are only wanting to build a mobile app, then you will use React Native coupled with a backend API and you could build that with Laravel.

Either way, stick with laravel for the backend if you already have experience with it. (: