Fronteers has a new website. We have worked on this for five years, but we can finally show you the final result!
The website was created by a large group of volunteers who, during the COVID-19 pandemic, came together online and later in Utrecht for multiple sessions to work on the site. The aim was to do it together: to create a project where not only the final result was important, but the process itself as well. It was a way to collaborate with that one colleague you know through Fronteers, even if you normally wouldn’t get the chance to work with them. And to learn from each other, as we consider knowledge sharing to be very important as an association.
This is also why it took a bit longer. Such a social project naturally suffered under the global COVID-19 pandemic. But we at Fronteers don’t give up easily, and the final result speaks for itself!
The new website was built with Eleventy, a static site generator developed by Zach Leatherman. We hope that by choosing Eleventy, we’ve picked a system that any developer can relatively easily navigate. Is it perfect? No. Is it flawless? Far from it. But that also has a certain charm. If you spot something, you can create an issue or fork the repo and propose a change yourself. And if you’re new to this, there’s likely a volunteer who’d be happy to help you learn how Git works, as this is a great place to practice.
But what can you do on this new site?
- If you’re a member of the association, you can create a profile to showcase yourself. This profile will be linked from our member directory. Once we have enough profiles, we can launch pages where you can be found as a job seeker, freelancer, or as someone willing to mentor juniors.
- You can also write and submit a blog. Write your blog in Markdown (you can find a template on GitHub) and place it in the correct folder. Submit a pull request, and someone from our marketing committee will review your submission. If your PR is merged, your blog will appear on the site! 👏
- If your company has a job vacancy, your developers can make corrections to it until the vacancy expires, in a process that’s less dependent on a single volunteer. Shout-out to Bernard Nijenhuis, who handled our job board for years! 🙏
- The site is now bilingual, with the hope of involving English-speaking expats in the association.
- Finally, our website visitor statistics are now publicly available for everyone to view.
Acknowledgements
First, we’d like to thank the volunteers and contributors who have contributed to this new website over the years!
We are hosted by Netlify, who sponsors us with an Open Source Unlimited package.
The design was created by Ready For Take-Off, who you may know from the designs of the Fronteers Conference in 2015, 2016, and 2017.