Buchanan's Whisky Rebuild

The Past

Buchanan’s Whisky is one of the most famous Scotch whisky brands in the world. As one of the leaders in Scotch Whisky, they needed an informative and modern site. The original site was starting to feel outdated in both layout and design. As for site content, the original site featured information about the Buchanan’s family, their whiskies, whisky culture, and signature drinks. The site content was informative and engaging so it was decided that some site content would be re-used. The rebuilt site would feature the same engaging site content in a more concise and visually appealing way.

The Present

I was very excited to start working on the build after receiving the designs. The new site featured sliders, recipe grids, and even a history timeline (that was sadly eventually scrapped). I ended up deciding that I would be using parts of the MERN tech stack. The client also emphasized good SEO so I decided on using NextJS. NextJS is a React framework that offers server-side rendering and easy SEO implementation for React applications. I have used NextJS before but have been using much more after seeing companies like Netflix, Twitch, and Hulu use the framework as well. Thanks to NextJS, I was able to focus on coding features rather than configuration. Server-side rendering was working right out of the box and components like ‘next/head’ made writing SEO much easier. Outside of NextJS, I decided to use SCSS for styling and MobX for state management.

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