While we try and upgrade our site once every 6 months, we have been really busy this year with improving our client websites and rolling out a number of supplementary websites. The fact that Bootstrap 4 was out in Beta and we were still in Bootstrap 3 gave us the kick that we needed to start the transition. We were really happy with the look and feel of the site so we didn’t want any theme changes but we really wanted to make it easy to build templates, connect our Marketing Automation platform and make our pages look and work better. What we really want before the end of the year is a solid foundation for the next year where we can roll out a number of new products, market them effectively and integrate all the other systems that we have been building in the last 2 years.

Bootstrap framework upgrade

We have been building a very modular site since the beginning of the year where we have completely separated the data, the theme and the functionality of the site. So it was amazing to see all that come to fruition. The framework upgrade actually only took us a couple of minutes to complete,  collectively blowing our minds on the highs that website development has reached today.  In the past this would have been a few days at least for a website of our size and the components it has. Yes, some pages and templates didn’t work but 90% of the site and 95% of pages visited every day was functional and working straight out.

Separation of Components

One of the core changes we have been working on our site has been a separation of components. Similar to how a MVC system works, we have been trying to separate the skin and the functionality. While in the past this was all interconnected and an upgrade to the site meant separating them, rolling out the new site and then meshing them together again, we are now able to keep the functionality separate from the framework. This makes doing upgrades on our site a breeze.

Better ways of displaying data

We have also built a number of components to create better ways of displaying data. In the age where Google is king, our pages are expanding at the rate of our waists. So its time to trim them up by using gradients, boxes, icons and components that we can use from Bootstrap to make big amounts of content look more aesthetic and easily digestable.

Breaking up with CSS and in bed with SASS

As of this iteration, we are also fully running on SASS and ditching the age old CSS behind. We loved CSS but we were swayed by competition. SASS allows us to make styling changes to our website blazingly fast and with less code and less time. We want to reach a point where we can make fundamental theme changes and updates to the site in minutes and not hours.

Integrated Marketing Automation

This was probably the biggest thing we really wanted on this update. We have been setting up our Marketing Automation platform and we really wanted it to be fully integrated to our website. We are so excited that  full Marketing Automation integration is also complete on the site. This opens up a huge opportunity for us to now improve our website and our funnel.  Having the lead flow, lead follow up means that we can now focus on the top end of the funnel and let the mid and bottom end of the funnel work out by itself.

Why talk about our site upgrade?

As an agency, we feel like every time we upgrade our website, we learn and lot. What we learn from working on our website, we can start rolling them out to our customers. We thought that this post will be a good introduction to how we upgrade our sites and how we can help you with your site upgrade.  Please feel free to check out our WordPress Development page and our Marketing Automation pages for more information on our offerings.