This site was built using Yeoman, Grunt, Backbone, Jade and Compass.
Mostly for fun to be fair. But there was some reasoning...
Because it seems like a really good idea with a lot of really nifty kit to use as a starting point for a new site.
Why on earth not? They make life easier.
Using Jade with Yeoman basically gives me a static site generator with templates and includes. This made it a lot easier set up real pages for each section of the site even though the content is loaded using AJAX.
So if someone comes to a page other than the home page, everything will still work. Also, robots and crawlers without JS will still get the correct page content. For example, the contact page exists as a real page with only the contact info on that page. If a robot hits the contact page, that is what they'll see. If a real user hits the contact page, the additional content will load via AJAX so that they're essentially seeing a single page app and then the Backbone router and views will manage their experience.
Backbone changed everything for me. Before Backbone I just did everything in the DOM using JQuery. Backbone helps me to think about my JS a bit smarter and a bit more Object Oriented like. Also, the built in Router with Push State support comes in pretty handy for simple things like this. As do the Views of course.
I ended up using the one view for all of the pages which is a bit lazy but for such a small site it seemed like a good thing to do at the time.
The Groundskeeper Grunt plugin was a bit of a find. Makes it very easy to strip out all console statements before publishing. https://github.com/Couto/grunt-groundskeeper
This is my first time experimenting with SVG for the graphics. I must say it was almost disappointingly non-eventful. Don't know why I haven't been using SVG before now. This page was a good reference: http://css-tricks.com/using-svg/
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