7-Tips for Starting a React Project!

Input the following code inside your terminal:

npx create-react-app my-app

Congratulations you are done! the whole project has started! (It was a joke, but that has typically been the first command I enter to start a react project.) But let’s get serious. React is a wide JavaScript library, used by thousands of coders. If you are trying to learn how to use it to build your first site you have to think a few steps ahead before starting your project. These tips will help you:

1. List out what you are designing for.
2. Draw out what you intend your website to look like!

Use pen and paper with a ruler if you aren’t good with photoshop :)

3. Section off the design into portions of your site that you are going to work on individually. For example: nav-bar, logo placement, images, content, hot-links, footer.

4. Once you section-off those pages, break down those into individual components into smaller chucks for you to work on. For example, what do you want in your nav-bar? Sign in/out, links to another section of your page, notifications.

5. Once you have broken down those components into smaller section, label which ones persist throughout your platform. These are the ones I typically work on first before I try doing anything else. You can work any way you want to though.

6. Next, you want to figure out if you want to use Redux, or not. Its hard to implement Redux, at first but if you want to implement it in the middle of your project…Good luck!

7. Think of where you want State to live inside of your components. You don’t want to put State everywhere on a large project because it will require a lot of front end processing power. Leave all of the heavy lifting and processing power to the backend!

Good luck with your projects!