Started as an Instagram account sharing content centered around the science fiction genre: CYBERPUNK. My Instagram account quickly grew to thousands of users, and then to over 10,000 over a couple of years.

Taking my existing userbase I decided to turn the social media account I grew into an E-commerce website. I have done freelance work in the past building out WordPress / WooCommerce websites for small businesses, so it was a platform I was familiar with. But I had never built a custom theme completely from scratch.

Without time or cost restraints I wanted to build a WordPress site that was lightweight and fast. Using previous experience with Unix servers I set up a droplet on DigitalOcean and configured NGINX to serve pages as fast as possible. I built out a lightweight WordPress theme from the ground up using the least amount of plugins I could and staying away from large CSS, JavaScript, and image files as much as I could.

It was the fastest website I had ever built receiving a mobile score of 71 and desktop score of 95 from Google PageSpeed Insights.

I now maintain the site and social media account as hobbies. And use them as creative outlets to design graphic t-shirts.