Best Architecture for a BASIC/Simple website

So, the cool news is I now have the knowledge to hook a database up to an MVC back-end and create views using HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, and jQuery. I also learned how to use web APIs to simply send raw data to the front-end and then render it up using jQuery/AJAX/Bootstrap.

But, some of my first projects are going to be simple, such as I want to make a nice portofilio website for myself… What do web developers typically use for a simple site like this? While I can create a big platform like I described above, is there any reason to for a simple portfolio or “business info” type of website? Do I need to make a database or can/should I just hard-code my pages? I don’t plan on having user registration functionality… How does a developer typically make these decisions?

To what degree does a web developer usual complicate a simple site and for what reasons? What technologies would you use to make a simple portfolio site? And I mean in the ideal situation ie without time or budgetary constraints and if you did it how you wanted to. Thank you.

For my portfolio I just use GitHub pages, which lets you push a GitHub repo to a live site - it only really works for static pages, but that’s fine for a portfolio.

You might decide to go with a database backed platform if you also wanted to handle things like selling products through the same site (maybe custom CSS templates or ebooks) and you wanted to maintain a customer database? But even then I’d probably find someone else’s solution instead of rolling my own for security purposes.

When you say security, are you talking about for the web store related stuff? Like purchasing?

That would be my main concern, but it also includes all the little things that I wouldn’t think of.

I remember a long time ago when I was messing around with PHP and MySQL and I was pretty pleased with myself for getting a user database and login system up and running. It wasn’t until sometime later that I learned I’d left everything wide open to very simple attacks because I wasn’t sanitising inputs.

That problem is largely solved with modern stacks, but it’s the other problems I don’t know about that leave me cautious about implementing my own solutions to things when a proper Pro has already rolled out something loads of people use :slight_smile:

That said, I’m not a pro, so all of this just comes from newbie paranoia :smile:

Ohhh gotcha. Yeah that makes sense. I agree. Luckily, I’m in a course and my teacher has been doing a pretty good job teaching us how to make secure stuff by not exposing our database domain models to hackers and stuff like this… Though I’m sure there is something that I haven’t been taught that could be a hole… But I love back-end man and I may have to get my crap hacked a few times in order to improve… But you’re right, I wouldn’t make any type of payment system or store anyone’s payment details until I’m really freakin good at security or else I’ll just piss people off and get sued lol.

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