What is Sanity?

During the digital era, having a strong online presence becomes a decisive element of business for various professionals in different areas. Creating a personalized portfolio website is a strong point that proves your talent, projects, and achievements. In this ultimate guide, we will look at the procedure of building a portfolio composed of dynamic and visually enticing components using Sanity, a headless CMS, and Next.js, a React-based framework for web development.

What is Sanity?

In this blog, we will put together a detailed guide to help you build a functional and beautiful portfolio using Sanity and Next.js. Thus, this article will explain what Sanity is and why it is essential to our project.

Sanity: A Flexible Headless CMS

Sanity is an excellent, lightweight CMS (Content Management System) that combines an intuitive headless system with developers' and content creators' needs. Unlike the ones you know as back-end and front-end, Sanity follows a headless architecture, a solution for managing content in the back end, and a different one in the front end. This also brings greater flexibility concerning how the content is structured, organized, and provided to final users.

Key Features of Sanity:

• Real-time Collaboration:Insanity delivers a real-time collaborative space for processing the content. Only multiple team members can collaborate on content simultaneously, which is ideal for successful teamwork across distributed networks.
• Structured Content:With Sanity, you can describe your content schemas using the Sanity schema language. Such flexibility is a distinct advantage when designing a portfolio consisting of different content types, like projects, skills, and experiences, that should be presented coherently.
• Headless Architecture:The headless solution of Sanity helps you render content events regardless of the front-end technology you use. This flexibility gives us an edge when integrating with Next.js to make dynamic websites and applications.

Why Sanity and Next.js?

Let's deliberate on beginning our portfolio creation and why Sanity and Next.js are useful for the project.

Sanity:

The sanity CMS is a flexible and stable headless CMS that helps you easily create a new content structure and organization. It is an excellent option to implement such data for portfolio management due to its real-time collaborative environment, which is especially suitable for content creation.

Next.js:

Next.js speeds up the process of developing React applications with features such as server-side rendering, automatic code splitting, and simplified routing. These aspects, in turn, turn it into an interesting and effective framework for creating fast and scalable SEO-friendly web applications, which are absolutely perfect for an effective professional portfolio.

Step 1: Set Up Your Environment

Before we start building the portfolio, ensure you have Node.js and npm (Node Package Manager) installed on the machine. You can initiate a new Next.js project by executing the following commands in your terminal:

npx create-next-app my-portfolio

cd my-portfolio

npm install

Step 2: Create a Sanity Project

You should install the Sanity CLI to initialize the Sanity project. Execute the following commands in your terminal:

npm install -g @sanity/cli

sanity init

Following the instructions, create a new project and choose the "Clean project with no predefined schema" when prompted.

Step 3: Define Your Content Model in Sanity

Now, you can run your sanity project and open the schemas/schema.js file using the sanity CLI in the project. This is where you’ll outline the structure of your portfolio's content using the Sanity schematic language. Remember the different types of content you want to highlight, such as projects, skills, experiences, and others.

Step 4: Add Content to Your Sanity Studio

Launch the Sanity Studio by executing the following command in your terminal:

sanity start

Navigate to localhost:3333 in your browser to access the Sanity Studio. With the Sanity interface, which is user-friendly, you manage your content in a breeze.

Step 5: Connect Next.js with Sanity

Here, you will connect your Next.js app to Sainty to enable it to retrieve data from your Sanity project. Begin by installing the Sanity client in your Next.js project:

npm install @sanity/client

Now that the client is installed, create a new instance in your Next.js pages to load the data from your Sanity project. That link lets your portfolio load your content as you feed it into the Studio.

Step 6: Build Your Portfolio Components

Next, you have your data flow from Sanity to Next.js, so you are ready to create React components for the different sections of your portfolio. Think about the Header's About Me, Projects, and Contact sections. Use the data fetched from Sanity to interactively populate these components, thus creating a user-friendly and context-specific experience for the users.

Step 7: Style Your Portfolio

Improve the aesthetic feel of your digital resumé using styles. Among the options, you can select CSS in JS libraries such as Styled Components. Also, importing an external CSS framework such as Tailwind CSS is possible. Adapt the designs to complement your brand and ensure they create a consistent, professional look and feel. Adcomrs provides various marketing services, including strategy development, media planning and buying, creative development, and campaign execution.

Step 8: Deploy Your Portfolio

Having already built your portfolio's content and design, you are ready to share it with the community. Frameworks like Vercel and Netlify provide straightforward deployment. Examine the respective documentation to implement your portfolio application by using Next.js, then make it available so that it will appear before potential employers or clients.

Conclusion:

Congratulations! You created your portfolio website with a personalized and dynamic theme using Sanity and Next.js. Your digital image has become a mirror of your talents, works, and attainments, which anyone willing to know your career can reach anytime.

As you travel from one moment of your career to another, remember that your portfolio is a fixed document that grows with every experience and achievement. Maintain its currency by adding new projects, skills, or achievements so it continues to portray an accurate image of your skills. Your professional identity will look impressive and will be well enough displayed on the internet so that such a powerful impression will impact any potential employer, client, or colleague. Leverage your portfolio where growing opportunities lie, and continue to be positive assets in your professional engagements!