The Dragon News Nex.js

🔹 Project Overview

The Dragon News is a modern news web application built with Next.js that allows users to browse the latest headlines, explore news by category, and read detailed articles. The project was created to deeply understand and demonstrate Next.js rendering patterns, data fetching strategies, and UX best practices in a real-world content-driven application.

Rather than focusing only on UI, this project emphasizes performance, caching behavior, and user experience during data loading and errors.

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🔹 Problem Statement

Content-heavy platforms like news websites must balance fresh data, performance, and user experience. Improper caching or rendering strategies can lead to slow load times, stale content, or poor UX during navigation failures.

This project addresses those challenges by:

• Using multiple Next.js data-fetching strategies

• Handling loading, error, and not-found states gracefully

• Optimizing image loading and page transitions

• Structuring content for scalability and performance

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🔹 Role & Responsibility

Role: Frontend / Next.js Developer
Ownership: Complete implementation

• Designed page structure and routing

• Implemented multiple data-fetching strategies

• Built custom loading, error, and not-found pages

• Optimized images and user experience

• Deployed and tested the application on Vercel

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🔹 Core Features

• Browse latest and top news headlines

• Read full news articles via dynamic routes

• Filter news by category

• Smooth navigation with clear loading feedback

• Custom error and not-found pages

• Optimized image loading using blur placeholders

• Responsive and clean UI design

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🔹 Technology Stack

Frontend

• Next.js (App Router concepts & data fetching)

• React.js

• Material UI for structured components

• Tailwind CSS for utility-first styling

• JavaScript

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🔹 Data Fetching & Rendering Strategy

This project intentionally uses multiple Next.js data fetching patterns to demonstrate practical understanding:

• Static data with revalidation for content that doesn’t require instant freshness

• cache: "no-store" for always-fresh data

• Controlled revalidation intervals to balance performance and accuracy

This showcases real-world decision-making rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.

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🔹 Routing, UX & Error Handling

• Implemented custom loading pages to improve perceived performance

• Created custom error pages for failed requests

• Added a not-found page for invalid routes or missing content

• Used dynamic routes for article details

• Ensured smooth navigation between category and detail pages

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🔹 Image Optimization

• Used Next.js image optimization features

• Implemented blurDataURL and placeholder loading

• Reduced layout shift and improved visual loading experience

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🔹 Challenges & Solutions

Challenge: Balancing fresh news content with fast load times.
Solution: Applied different caching strategies depending on content type using Next.js data-fetching options.

Challenge: Handling broken routes or failed data requests gracefully.
Solution: Implemented custom loading, error, and not-found pages to ensure consistent UX.

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🔹 Performance & SEO Considerations

• Optimized rendering strategy per page

• Reduced unnecessary refetching

• Improved perceived performance through skeleton/loading states

• Structured content suitable for SEO-friendly indexing