Finally Live! Arndtteunissen with a New Website
11.12.2023
As the saying goes, the cobbler's children have the worst shoes. Well, ours were by no means the worst. But our website was no longer really stylish or convenient, not least for editorial work. And technical development had also become rather tedious.
We have therefore developed a new website for our agency. In doing so, we migrated, revised and restructured many reference projects, and in some cases rebuilt them fundamentally from scratch. This is achieved through a semi-automated migration and is a genuine unique selling point compared with many other systems. Besides importing images, videos and texts, these are also inserted into the layout according to our design specifications. This saved us hundreds of hours of work! We also shot video content with a professional camerawoman in order to show everyday agency life authentically. In addition, our UX/UI designers have made the user interface more elegant and intuitive. The biggest changes, however, lie in the technology. This is where it gets particularly interesting for web technology enthusiasts:
Until now, we built our website with the successful German CMS TYPO3. But our requirements for a content management system for the agency have changed considerably of late, so we opted for Strapi, an entirely new headless CMS.
For what at first glance is a small website, this is a technically exciting solution. Headless content management systems such as Strapi offer a new kind of flexibility in website design, as they allow the backend and frontend to be separated. This makes it easier to adapt and integrate new technologies without touching the entire system. The clear separation of content creation and presentation makes scalability easier and promotes faster development and updating of websites. In addition, the headless approach allows content to be delivered easily to different platforms and devices, since the content is independent of the presentation medium (browser on a laptop, presentation monitor on the wall, smartwatch, etc.). This makes Strapi an efficient choice for modern, demanding web projects.
A lot has also changed on our frontend.
Thanks to the headless system, we are technologically free of restrictions on the frontend, and we therefore opted for a hybrid SPA+SSR approach. This means that, on the one hand, we generate static HTML pages that guarantee the fastest possible delivery times from the web server and, on the other, we can deliver all the user experience benefits of a single-page application. Specifically, we use Nuxt.js for this. This is a frontend framework based on Vue.js that offers a structured, component-based development environment. It implements standardised conventions, such as file-system-based routing, which makes code organisation easier and allows developers to concentrate on the actual logic.
Another advantage of Nuxt.js is the simple handling of data. The framework makes it possible to define asynchronous data functions for each page, which are called before rendering. This allows data to be retrieved from various sources and used in the page components. This promotes a clear separation of data and presentation and makes the code easier to maintain and extend.
The advantages of a JavaScript-based frontend are particularly noticeable when it comes to loading times. Simply clear your browser cache, reload our site and have a browse. A smooth experience with quickly displayed content is guaranteed. Even videos fade in smoothly, as if they were only a few kilobytes in size.
Are you interested in more information about headless content management systems? Please get in touch.
Enjoy exploring.
Benjamin Arndt, Managing Director Arndtteunissen