First Professional Project

The most important professional Gatsby project you or your organization will ever ship is your first project.

Why is that?

Shipping Gatsby websites changes the conversation

• Shipped means more real. It’s common to talk about exciting new technologies, but much less common to actually see them used in production. Shipping a Gatsby website will make others see Gatsby as an actual choice to consider.
• Seeing is believing. Gatsby sites shock people by how fast they are. When someone ships a Gatsby site, other people start asking how they can get sites that fast.

People use adjectives for Gatsby sites like “disgustingly fast" — @kylemathews

Read more about "What makes Gatsby sites so fast?" https://t.co/Eg0qPFn7yn

(hosted on @Netlify 😎) pic.twitter.com/d0LysL1Fkj

— Netlify (@Netlify) June 25, 2018

• Discover allies. Once you ship a Gatsby website, other Gatsby enthusiasts may come out of the woodwork. It’s common to want change, but believe it’s impossible. When the first Gatsby site ships, others may join you in trying to push for increased Gatsby usage.

• Creating a case study. Once business metrics, such as decreased page load times, increased conversion rates, or decreased bounce rates, are available from the new project launch, you can use these metrics as evidence that Gatsby is worth considering.

How to ship your first website

Gatsby adoption within organizations tends to follow a “bottoms-up” rather than “top-down” approach.

What that means is that the first usage is typically not driven by executive mandate for a high-profile project. Instead, typically, initial websites are often smaller or have fewer stakeholders.

This could be one-off campaigns, landing pages, brochure sites, as well as documentation pages or other internal resources.