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I want to talk a little about our stack, or in other words, what we use to ensure our web projects run efficiently, work smoothly on deployment and ultimately retain all the subtle design and brand details we work so hard to build in. Brand and strategy shouldn’t stop at a website, and so we work really (really) hard to ensure that all of the websites we build are technically as well as creatively brilliant.
The majority of our work is WordPress based, so this seems like a great starting point. We’ve worked hard over the past year to really improve our workflow, allowing us to build sites quicker than ever whilst ensuring a high standard of work. To achieve this we have a great base theme which we’ve developed in-house to match the most common needs and trends in the sites we build. ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) provides fantastic page flexibility with Flex Content, meaning we can share components across pages easily.
Now when it comes to the look and feel of the sites, we make use of a few technologies. Sass is a fantastic improvement on CSS, which we pair with TailWind – a great utility first CSS framework, meaning it doesn’t impose any design. Combine this with a few JavaScript libraries, maybe some VueJS, and we have a slick, fluid site, all compiled with Webpack.
So we have a great looking site, what’s next? Well, the dreaded final testing. We actively test during development so we can catch bugs early, but even so, there’s the odd one lurking at the end. BrowserStack makes it super easy to check our sites across operating systems and browsers.
Next comes deployment. We utilize Git throughout the development process and there are many reasons to do this, including ease of deployment. Over the past few months, we’ve moved our hosting stack in-house, making use of Digital Ocean as a server provider, paired with Plesk for easy management.
Great, so that just covers the stack involved in a “standard site” but, being designdough, we don’t tend to like to describe our work as “standard”. We’re constantly looking at new trends and learning and playing with new tech. For example, we’ve recently launched a helpdesk system internally for our clients, built with Laravel – an amazing PHP framework. We’ve also begun playing with Shopify so we can offer more options for our e-commerce clients. We’re constantly tinkering with Hybrid applications too, using Electron to create desktop applications using a web stack. The point is we’re constantly learning, developing and making.