Responses by 1minus1.

Background: We wanted to create a site that showed us willing to put ourselves out on a limb. I guess what we really meant by that we were trying to ignore trends and just do our own thing while still keeping in mind the audience to which we wanted to cater. We did think about the audience we wanted to reach and how we would get to them, so we had to make some small compromises to make sure our site would perform from an SEO perspective.

Our client base is largely in Surrey and London, but we also have clients in the north and in Europe too. We had the additional challenge of needing to remain broad enough without becoming innocuous, which can be a bit of a challenge.

From the campaign side, we do a lot of marketing for clients but very little—or essentially none—for ourselves. We intended to change that, but then another client project would come up and that takes precedence. An age-old story!

Favorite details: I think we are most proud of the optimizations we have made to portray there is a heck of a lot going on across a number of quite different elements. It’s not a “one idea” site: we broke it up into a number of different sections because, as a one concept site, we started to bore ourselves—and if we were bored we were sure everyone else would be. So we pushed it a bit. For some, that may mean our site lacks consistency. We call it eclectic!

Challenges: Our most challenging part of the process was allocating resources to the site’s creation. There were several points where we couldn’t work on the site for a number of months because we were too booked up. It was frustrating but probably better than the alternative!

If we did the site again we would weigh the pros and cons of Nuxt and smoothscroll. Those elements caused a lot of discussion late in the build.

Navigation structure: We wanted to keep the navigation as simple as possible and keep people focused on the page content itself. We are quite fond of the way that the Insights section navigates, though, largely because we just threw caution to the wind and did whatever we wanted there.

Technology: We used VueJS and Node for the website with lots of little add-ins as needed. We weren’t proud of using pre-existing tech to flesh out what we were creating, but there is certainly a lot of custom JavaScript work on the site as well. We used Bootstrap in its entirety initially, but we stripped that back as we went on to increase performance.

Bearing in mind that our site is a single-page app, we had to do a lot to make sure we were on fire for SEO. That takes work, but we got there. Finally, we did make it available as a PWA. Completely unnecessary for a site like ours probably, but we’re pleased we did it.