Our website redesign is live!
After almost a decade, the new Enovate website is live, a ground-up rebuild on Astro, launched in our 25th year.
I’m just letting those words sink in for a moment. It probably shouldn’t seem like a big deal for a web design agency to redesign their own website, but it really is. The previous incarnation of enovate.co.uk was mostly built in the latter part of 2016 and launched early in 2017, so it’s almost a whole decade since we last accomplished this. Along the way there was a failed attempt too (version 5 RIP). Client work is, and always will be, our priority.
It’s definitely been difficult to find the time amongst all our client projects, and the only real way we’ve made this happen was through somewhat drastic action. I took a “holiday” in early March, but instead of time away from the office I ramped up my efforts and spent the week working tirelessly on the redesign. That was the “big push” that really made some headway where we hadn’t before, and it set the tone for “we’re getting this done” rather than “let’s give it another try”.
Heads down
After that week we kept the momentum going through the remainder of March and into April, and tried to consistently tick off at least a couple of tasks every week so that steady progress eventually got us to completion. It wasn’t pretty: evenings, weekends and the odd 1am finish were all too common.
There are a few quotes I’ve kept front of mind throughout that feel fitting to share here.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
This is exactly what has derailed previous redesign attempts. I haven’t been completely happy, and striving for perfection has meant we’ve ended up with nothing, the project fizzling out, never to see the light of day. I can’t honestly say I’m 100% happy with the redesign as it stands today, but the moment we crossed a point where it felt like a clear improvement on our previous site, that was my cue to put it live. There’s always much to improve, and certainly more testing to be done, but I’m looking forward to continuing to evolve the site over time.
Another quote I’ve reminded myself of along the way is from The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy:
"I can't see a way through," said the boy.
"Can you see your next step?"
"Yes."
"Just take that," said the horse.
That was a great reminder that, although the task sometimes seemed huge and daunting when looking at it as a whole, getting a single thing done (one task ticked off) was enough, and that consistency would quickly compound, and here we are.
A leaner stack
The website is a ground-up rebuild and, somewhat surprisingly, we’ve switched away from Craft CMS and are using the Astro framework with markdown files to manage the site content. Astro pre-renders the entire site to static HTML at build time, so every page is fast out of the box and there’s no PHP or database stack to maintain in production. Content lives in MDX files alongside the code, version-controlled in Git, which means writing a blog post is the same workflow as shipping a feature.
For styling we’ve moved to Tailwind CSS, a big shift from the Sass-driven approach of v4 (Tailwind did not exist back then!). On top of that there’s a light dusting of Alpine.js for interactivity, GSAP for animation, Three.js and D3 powering some of the more visually ambitious moments, and Pagefind generating a static search index at build time so search works without a server. The site is deployed to Vercel, with their image optimisation handling responsive imagery.
It’s a deliberately lean stack (no database, no application server, no admin panel) and it lets us spend our time writing content and refining design rather than wrestling with infrastructure. Not really a suitable approach for client projects, where editorial flexibility matters more than developer ergonomics, but it suits us perfectly. We couldn’t be more comfortable with markdown files.
Four pillars
We also took the opportunity to overhaul the website content, removing services that are no longer a real focus of our time and bringing in new services that will drive our growth going forward. We’ve reframed our offering around four distinct pillars: Web Design & Build, Web Applications, AI Implementation and Data Visualisation, along with the usual array of supporting services that complement them.
Nods to the past
The timing of the redesign also couldn’t be much better. This being our 25th year in existence, it seems an ideal time to refresh the site and forge ahead into the next decade with a new and shiny online home.
I also wanted this redesign to hark back to times gone by and borrow features and ideas from previous incarnations of enovate.co.uk. So if you hover over the logo you’ll notice that the letters fall off. That was a playful feature of our very first website, built entirely within Macromedia Flash (later Adobe Flash). The footer “playground” is another nod backwards: it was inspired by the interactive masthead on enovate.co.uk version 2, again that used Flash to provide a playful element of interactivity for visitors, although we have somewhat dialled that up to 11 for this version.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on the redesign, good and bad, so feel free to drop us an email at hello@enovate.co.uk.
