Our new website is finally live

A new website had been on our wish list for quite a while. Last Friday, we finally got to raise a glass to it. Champagne seemed appropriate: after nine years, the old website was ready to retire. Thanks for the bubbles, Victor from Tasteindex!

A website for five people

Our previous website was designed and built nine years ago. There were five of us, and 10KB had only been around for a few years. The website reflected who we were and what we did at the time.

Of course, we updated the copy along the way. A new colleague, another case study, a bit more detail about a service. But the main structure stayed the same. Meanwhile, we grew to seventeen people, moved to a new office and saw plenty of changes in software development.

Eventually, the website was mostly telling the story of the company we used to be. It was time to show who we are today.

We have more to talk about now

The biggest change is in the work we do. Nine years ago, most of it consisted of one-off projects taking a few hundred hours. Today, we mainly work on the ongoing development of business-critical software. These applications often represent thousands of hours of work and a lot of code. Organisations rely on them every day.

You want to keep adding features efficiently while everything already in place keeps running reliably. That takes much more than knowing a programming language. It involves:

• Automated tests and linting: checking that existing features still work and catching errors in the code early.
• Error monitoring and alerting: detecting errors in production and getting notified when something goes wrong.
• Observability: using logs, metrics and traces to understand what is happening inside an application and why.
• Dedicated AI skills: project-specific instructions that help AI work with the codebase and follow the project's conventions.
• Strict engineering principles: clear agreements on architecture, code quality and reviews, so the next change remains easy to understand and test.
• CI/CD: automatically checking and building changes, then releasing them to production in a controlled way.

This work has become a much bigger part of what we do. Our new website gives it more room, from codebase analysis to maintaining software that has been running for years. Even now, we have not covered everything. But we have made a start, and we will be writing more about it.

And yes, we still enjoy building something new in a few hundred hours. Those projects often turn out to be so successful that we keep building together afterwards. A new application becomes an ongoing development partnership.

Designs from the archives, brought together in a device mockup. Including the copy that still needed filling in at the time.

A brand identity to match our office

After nine years, the design was due a refresh too. We still liked the hexagons and other geometric shapes. The blue and purple felt a little less like us these days.

If you have visited our office, you will understand where the new colours came from. Lots of plants, lots of green and yellow. It feels like home, and we wanted the website to feel that way too. So our brand identity follows our office interior. Apparently, you can do it in that order.

That was the brief we gave Kenmerk design agency two years ago. The geometric shapes could stay, but the colours and overall feel needed to reflect 10KB as it is today. We liked the design straight away. All that remained was to build it and write the copy.

That sounded quicker than it turned out to be.

Just need to finish our own website

The design had been ready for a while, but development and all the new content took longer to follow. A website for your own company turns out to be a project you can keep working on for quite some time.

And we wanted to get the content right. You cannot capture almost nine years of change just by swapping colours and tweaking a few sentences. We had to rethink what we wanted to say, how visitors would find their way around and how to show our experience through concrete examples. That meant lots of new pages, writing, reading them back and revising them again.

A lot has changed behind the scenes too. We build the new website with Qwik and write pages in Markdown, using our own plugins for the layout. That lets us maintain the content in the same editor we use to write software. You can read more about those choices, the site's speed and what we learned along the way in the case study about our own website.

Ready enough to launch

There is still plenty on our list. Over the coming months, we will add more content and tackle the things we have not got round to yet. But if you wait until there is nothing left to improve, you will never launch.

So the new website went live. And on Friday 25 September, we got the glasses out to celebrate together. Away from our screens for a moment, gathered on the tiered seating in our office, with champagne close at hand.

Nine years after the previous website, we have a site that feels like us again. That was worth popping a cork for.