Travel Photography Site: Astro & Tailwind
The site is now live! Click here to visit.
This is an ongoing personal project to develop and maintain a website to showcase my travel photography. It is intended as both a fun project to document the process of improving my photography skills, as well as an educational exercise to learn web development. I intend to eventually introduce additional features to the site, such as blog posts, though these are yet to be implemented.
Tech Stack
For this project, I chose the Astro framework. Astro is particularly well-suited to content and image-heavy websites because it emphasises fast, static-first rendering while still allowing interactive components where needed. This makes it ideal for a photography portfolio where performance and visual presentation are critical.
I paired Astro with Tailwind CSS for styling, as it allows me to quickly prototype clean, modern layouts without manually writing a lot of CSS. This combination has made it easier to experiment with different design ideas while keeping the overall look consistent and responsive across devices.
Other tools and libraries include:
- Markdown support: Lays the groundwork for future blog posts and written content.
- Git: Version control and hosting for the project's code.
- Deployment platform: Vercel for easy continuous deployment and hosting.
This tech stack allows me to focus on both the visual presentation of my photography and the performance of the site, while giving me the flexibility to add new features over time, such as blog posts, tagging, or interactive galleries.
Current Features
- A full-screen image carousel on the homepage to highlight selected works.
- A fixed navigation bar for easy browsing between sections.
- A photo collage/grid layout to showcase collections of images.
- Mobile-responsive design ensuring the site looks great and functions smoothly across all devices and screen sizes.
- Basic SEO optimisation (metadata, structured titles, alt text).
Roadmap
- A blog system to share travel stories and details of the photography process.
- Tagging and categorisation so users can browse by country, trip, or theme.
- A lightbox-style image viewer for a better fullscreen experience.
- Contact and About pages to give context and provide a way to connect with visitors.
- Potential integration with cloud storage/CDNs for scalable image hosting.
Reflections
This project is as much about sharpening my technical skills as it is about presenting my photography. Working with Astro and Tailwind has given me practical experience in modern web development, and building the site from scratch has taught me about balancing performance, aesthetics, and maintainability. Over time, I aim for the site to grow into a polished portfolio that reflects both my progression as a photographer and as a developer.