It’s the dogs danglies. Our new website is live.
Time flies when you are running a new business; there is always client work to do that takes priority over your own marketing efforts.
Our own worst client
When the “holding page” went live nearly a year ago, there were grand ambitions to get the “amazing new website” up post-haste. In between client projects there has been lots of scoping, wire-framing, designing, building and refinements. We are happy to announce that It is now out of the bag, in all its glory. Even after the numerous content refinements.
We love it. We have had some fantastic feedback on it and the dog surfing the internet video has generated most of the thumbs up so far. Better than a stock image of a handshake or a video a cityscape. The website aims to be a little bit different and we have kept that as the goal for the layout and UI from the start.
Being in the digital arena, it was important for us to try something new for our website. No more of the traditional single page/lots of scrolling and parallax trends that we see so much of. We wanted it to have a similar feeling to using an App, with tablets being the firm focus. Hamburger icons and slide-in navigation are such a common design practice now, everyone knows how to use them. Even those who don’t even realise the icon looks like a little hamburger.
The technical stuff
Behind the scenes, Facebooks React.js is at the heart of the UI. All the content being served by a JSON API allowing us to plug the site into our CMS of choice@CraftCMS. It means an easy content management and a slick interface. The JSON API allows us to push out the same content managed information to a non-javascript reliant, PHP driven backend using Slim and Twig - keeping Mr. Google happy.
With content loaded right from the outset, we have created an interface that responds to different sizes whilst remaining snappy. The social feed draws content directly from our social channels and blog, allowing us to publish content to the site instantaneously using the best mobile apps for the job, Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr.
As with every website, this isn’t a ‘launch and done’. The site is loaded with tracking and heat-map technology so we can see how people are using it. Iterative refinement is the next step and list is already growing…
Have a good nose around the website and let us know what you think.
P.S. Have you found Fabio yet? (Hint - he’s not the dog)
