Building Remotespace.io

Update: Remotespace.io no longer exists :(

In this post you can read about how I took Remotespace.io from an idea to a complete website.

The idea

I've recently been reading a lot about remote work and digital nomads. While doing this I found plenty of good content about how to get started, creating a business and marketing but also inspiring stories and views on everyday life. I really think that this is the future of work and I figured I could post everything that I like on a website, so you can access it too.

Building

The first obstacle was how the site should look and what basic functionality should be offered. I started out with some basic sketches in my notebook, looking something like this

My first idea was to put all the different kinds of resources such as articles, blogposts, books, etc on the top navbar. This would lead to a familiar design for most users and on mobile I could just use a hamburger navigation that toggles.

Now that I had a basic understanding of what I wanted the site to look like I fired up Sketch to make some initial mock-ups. I try to make most design decisions early on to avoid rewriting a bunch of css over and over again later (which I ended up doing anyway). After some iterations I ended up with this:

Something about the design bothered me. It was that a user had to navigate the site just to get to all the articles. I made some more pen-and-paper sketches and thought about what kind of content that would be posted initially. Since most posts will be some kind of articles I figured that I could just use a one-page site that displays all articles instead. This way the users don't need to navigate the site to browse articles, they can just scroll. The mobile layout would also be easier to use since I could get rid of the hamburger menu which has obvious UX problems.

I still wanted the users to be able to access posts within a specific topic so I added a tags feature. Clicking on a tag allows the user to watch all posts for that tag. Sounds familiar? That's the point.

Finally, I added a FAQ page to handle the different questions users might have.

Finishing up

I also need some way to add content to the site. I figured a basic CRUD admin app would be enough for this. When I was finished with the code I needed to add some content. This wasn't particularly hard since I had a bunch of great articles I've read the past weeks. This is the result:

I'd love it if you checked it out, Remotespace.io. If you have any questions or just want to chat, hit me up on Twitter @drikerf.