404 Place Vendôme

What is 404 Place Vendôme ?

404 Place Vendôme is a jewellery company which was created in 2016 by two people. One of the founders father was a founder of gold and metals. I joined the team, a few months after at the beginning of 2016. They asked for me to make, a configurator of products for the jewellery design. And then I made the website using 3JS and 3D and vanilla JS. At the time I didn't knew about, react or Vue. I showed them the concept I made with my godfather, and they were really impressed.

How did you discover Nuxt?

I discovered Nuxt in 2018 after a year and a half of JavaScript fatigue. It took a long time to discover Nuxt through reading a lot of medium articles and then one of our developers who had just joined us told me Nuxt is great and was really enthusiastic about Nuxt. Then I discovered Next.js and Guillermo Rauchs article from 2014 about what the web should be. It's a very old article about React and Next but it was really interesting and some of the principles in this article were not being applied to our website. I think there are a lot of things to learn from reading this.

Why did you choose Nuxt as your frontend framework?

We first made the websites with React. We decided to make the back-office of the application first. Then we decided to switch to Vue, just to try for one day if the front of this website needs to be in Vue. And in one day we were so in love with Vue that I said, okay, let's make the front face with Vue, which is nonsense for a CTO because you have a front end with Vue and a backend app in React. Usually you use same technology for the back and the front office. We took a bet on the future to use Vue and it was so comfortable as a technology. Vue is really nice to learn, really easy.

So we started to make the font face using Vue, and I separated all the JS and CSS and HTML in separate files. We released a first version of the website In 2017. Then we asked ourselves about how we could make the website faster especially on the homepage. The problem with the homepage was that it's a SPA and it was really huge. When it loads, it loads on the browser so it was really slow. It was really difficult. So we tried to look at code splitting. We searched a lot. By the time of 2018 . I think the first reason was the SEO and also because of the nature of the 3D configurator, which is a one MB package, we could not make the websites as an SPA if we wanted to have good performance.

We were very happy to use Nuxt because there is a layer of learning and maintaining which is really time demanding that you don't have to deal with. For me Nuxt really is a great technology.

Are you using dynamic or static rendering? Why?

We decided to use static rendering because a page, with a lot of content, it's way better to have static rendering. Also you can just deploy to Amazon for free for your whole site.

What is your favorite feature?

Being performant by default is one of the best features. If you use threeJS or big libraries, you will need to code split so it will be way faster. Code splitting by default is a great feature, but there is also the progressive nature of the Nuxt framework. If you want to use a SCSS then in less than a minute, you install Sass as a package. And if you don't install it Nuxt will tell me there's a missing package. You don't have to think about technical problems, you think about creation. Nuxt is really easy to use.

Do you have performances benchmarks before & after using Nuxt?

We used to have a really bad page speed. At the time it was 10 and with Nuxt it was 70.

Would you recommend Nuxt?

Yes, definitively. I think Nuxt is really simple to use and I have recommend Nuxt to other friends and they all said, It's really easy and they were very happy to use it. I will be using it myself on future projects. I have worked on web technologies for a long time and I remember when I discovered Vue.js, I felt comfortable making websites for the first time and I was so happy to use the technology.