We have a new website!

In case you haven’t noticed already, we have a new website! Here, we delve into its slick functionality, our fun refreshed branding, and the objectives and solutions behind it all. Grab a cuppa and dive in…

Practising what we preach

We work hard to ensure our clients’ websites are designed and built in a way that offers maximum value to all. We felt it was time to apply the same principles to our own website, and have been re-energising it over the last few months with a focus on several goals:

• Provide more information on our services, partnerships, and networks

• Communicate these benefits more clearly

• Shine a spotlight on our culture and values

• Highlight our crew, company perks, and reasons TBB is a great place to work

The techy bit

Our previous site’s tech stack was simply WordPress with SCSS and JS/jQuery. We wanted to move away from Wordpress to remove the need for database and plugin updates. To utilise headless static builds, our new tech stack comprises Astro, Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js, and React.js, resulting in cutting-edge performance on both the front-end and back-end.

Compared to Wordpress, Astro is unbelievably fast - it generates every website with zero client-side JavaScript, by default. Astro automatically renders any of our components to HTML ahead of time and strips out any unused Javascript. This results in faster pages and better Core Web Vitals / Page Speed Insights scores.

Using Astro also allows us to leverage its unique zero-JavaScript front-end architecture, something they call ‘Astro Islands’, to unlock higher conversion rates with better SEO. Finally, Astro boosts our ease of use, giving us the flexibility to use any programming language we like - be it React, Preact, Solid, Svelte, Vue, or something else.

Improved user experience

With a mission to make our new website easier to manage and navigate, we’ve introduced The Hub, jam-packed with news, case studies, insights, and visuals of cool projects we’ve been working on. Here, Algolia enables users to search and filter the content, making it simple to find whatever they’re looking for. And it’s not just users who are benefitting. From our perspective, the new website makes content easier for us to manage and update, giving us all the tools to expand as the site grows with us.

Refreshing branding and visuals

We’re a fun and friendly bunch at TBB and wanted this to be reflective in the site experience. Alongside bringing warmth and a sense of personality to the site with images of the team, we’ve freshened up The Bigger Boat brand. Our existing grey and yellow colour palette felt a bit limiting, so we wanted a boost of brightness. Now, we have a larger, bolder palette, with each of our services corresponding to a colour. Not only does this lift the overall aesthetic and bring a sense of fun, it also helps users quickly navigate to where they want to be.

The Open Sans font we were using was also starting to look a little dated, leading us to switch it up and introduce a complementary font for headlines. Our refreshed logo is really just an evolution of our old one but more simple, bold, and easier to work with online. Finally, we wanted to reflect that we were much more than a digital agency and reflect our branding credentials as well as our other integrated services - our new brand identity does just that.