Behind the scenes at Whitespace

This month we had great pleasure in speaking with Director of Web Development and Co-Founder of Whitespace, Steve Elford to go behind the scenes at Whitespace and get into the technical side of building websites.

Why is a bespoke build a better option than an off the shelf template or a build your own website?

I’m tackling this question all the time.  There are great platforms out there to build your own website, like Wix, Squarespace or Shopify.  Some are annoyingly good but they come with a fixed template and so many options it can be overwhelming.  It can also be quite easy to break or lose consistency between pages.

For the long term, when you want something really special, then that’s where we come in.  We take your brand, or we create the brand and we build a bespoke designed site.  You get an intelligent build with a CMS to create your original intended design.  It means it is not an ‘off the shelf’ model and you don’t need to find loads of different compatible plugins afterwards to make it work for you.

We keep plugins to a minimum and ensure that we don’t have a tangled web of messy code behind the scenes.  I’m quite meticulous about clean source code because performance is more important than anything, I’ve learned that through so many years working alongside SEO specialists.  With website builders they use drag and drop interfaces, but the underlying code can be a mess, it makes me wince!  It happens behind the scenes but it is this solid quality build that’s going to perform well at a nice speed, this is what you pay for.   

We focus on the user journey and simple navigation to get what you need to know as quickly as possible.  It’s only so many seconds you have their attention for, otherwise they will leave the site and you will lose them.  We use some background apps, for example ‘Hotjar,’ which creates heat maps of a webpage, showing red spots in places where visitors slow and think.  It’s knowing your audience, and understanding what they are coming to the website for.  This comes up in the design stage.  Then we can intelligently advise on menu structure and sub-pages.

What is a CMS? Which ones do you guys work with?

CMS means Content Management System.  It is where you would log in to the backend of your site and it gives you the ability to update text, change images and create new pages.  We install it on virtually every site we build, and we work almost exclusively with two platforms, one being WordPress which is one of the most widely used on the web.  You can pick an off the shelf theme, install that and then configure it yourself.  But what we do is build themes from scratch, from design right through to development and testing.  

Our other option is our own platform called Traffic, which we have been developing and maintaining for over 10 years.   It was built from the ground up as the core system, with general page and image management, but then we’ve got a bunch of extensions, similar to WordPress plugins, but built by us. These include e-commerce, projects, staff profiles, event management and so on.  It gives people complete freedom and we have had great feedback over the years for its simplicity and ease of use.  We now have a fairly equal split of clients using Traffic and WordPress.  The next step for Traffic is the Version 2 rollout.  It’s been given a complete facelift and we’ve been rewriting a lot of the foundations to bring it up to speed with modern standards and we are hoping to have that ready by the end of the year. 

We also have all sorts of other internal side projects on the go, like a CRM we’ve called Blend which incorporates an accounting system and a project manager. We’ve trialled the project manager with our animation partner Ticktockrobot and they’re over the moon with it and using it for several clients now.  

Then we have Sussex County Business Clubs, our clients for the digital members’ cards which is fantastic, using digital wallet cards which enable users to use interesting features such as geolocation.  So if, for example, if you are exhibiting at a trade show and someone is in your vicinity, it can pop up and invite you over.  I love it.  It also means I can walk near, for example a member restaurant that has an offer on a Wednesday, and the offer will pop up on my phone.  We have awesome, positive feedback received already.

What are the technical considerations for good website performance?

That’s the big question, isn’t it?  We are all at the mercy of Google.  You can have a website that loads instantly to your own eyes, but when you run it through one of Google’s page speed tools, it will give you a 30% performance score!  It’s not just the speed of loading, it’s things like accessibility and best practices in the code that make a difference to your general visibility.

There are a few new options we’ve been playing with recently. One is an image manager called Cloudinary.  As well as intelligent image cropping, it uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN), distributing your uploaded content over loads of servers all over the world.  Your web browser then loads the content that’s geographically closest to you, optimising images on the fly and using next-gen formats for quick page loading.  We’ve used it on a few websites now and it’s massively improved the performance scores on the sites.  It demonstrates that behind the scenes of a website is a lot of work that people might not be aware of.  

There is a lot more to consider these days than just HTML and a bit of styling.  I’d say the majority of the websites we work on will integrate with an API, in some shape or form.  The flexibility is great but it has to be done in a way that doesn’t impact the performance of the site.  It is complicated what goes on in the background, and that’s probably why I don’t get much sleep!

www.whitespace.studio