southcoastweb
Here at southcoastweb we have an experienced and knowledgeable team who are ready to take your dreams and turn them into reality.
We’re a close-knit team based in Poole, Dorset on the south coast of the UK, and we’re proud to provide a personal service to all of our clients.
We can help you with the whole process of website design and development from choosing a domain and managing it for you, to providing high quality UK based web hosting on our own servers, to building your dream website. As well as our outstanding web design and development service we also offer SEO services to ensure your newly built website will get seen by the right people in all the major search engines.
About the Project
Building our own southcoastweb website presented a real opportunity for us to show off what we can do for our clients. As such, we’ve spent countless hours making sure every element is pixel perfect.
This project involved not only a stunning new website, but also a full rebrand of southcoastweb. The full process involved creating the perfect branding and logo, planning the flow of the website (UX), designing the website itself (UI) and then building the website in a fully bespoke system created within WordPress.
Because of the site’s large amount of blog content, news, articles, tutorials and documentation pages for our open-source projects, we wanted a tried and tested CMS system and WordPress seemed like the natural choice. However, we wanted a speedier, more customised and cutting-edge experience for our frontend.
We ultimately decided to create our own integration of InertiaJS for WordPress. This was probably the biggest technical challenge of the entire project but one which enabled us to combine the power of Vue 3, TailwindCSS and WordPress for an unparalleled developer and user experience.
The Branding
Hours of research, planning and experimenting went into creating what we feel is the perfect brand for southcoastweb. We wanted to create a modern yet friendly and welcoming feel to our brand, and every decision was made with this in mind.
For the logo, we toyed with many ideas such as improving our previous “boat” design, but landed on code brackets, with the brand name displayed directly to the right.
As for the colours, we settled on a purple and blue gradient, as we feel that this adds a bit of fun to the website and brand, while retaining that modern feel. The font “Jost” was chosen as it’s a sharp, dynamic font that reinforced the cutting-edge look of the brand.
Website Design
The primary aim of our website is to create a unique experience for all of our visitors. That is why we’ve built in filters that visitors can use to customise the website to better suit their needs. Content is prioritised based on these filters, so visitors can find what they’re looking for incredibly quickly.
We also wanted to show potential clients what we can do. That is why we’ve prominenty displayed screenshots of our work on our website. We’re extremely proud of our work, and love to create bespoke and creative solutions for all of our clients.
Overall we’ve achieved a clean, cutting edge feel to the website whilst displaying our content in a user-centric manner, meaning it is easily readable and adheres to all accesibility guidelines.
Website Build
Web technology and applications are constantly moving forward and southcoastweb pride ourselves on always being on the cutting-edge of technology. While others are content to stick to their comfort zones or rely on clunky page builders to create generic experiences, we wanted to push ourselves with our own website.
As mentioned previously, this website combines WordPress (as a headless CMS) with an InertiaJS/Vue3 frontend. The first challenge was actually creating the Inertia/Wordpress integration since and official one doesn’t currently exist. After that, we needed to integrate a fair few common plugins into InertiaJS such as ACF, Contact Form 7 and SmartCrawl.
Next up, we needed some custom Gutenberg blocks to enable our content editors to posts rich, immersive articles with dynamic intros, device screenshots, timelines, lists and expansion blocks.
Next, we weren’t content with the standard WordPress search functionality, so we built our own Meilisearch integration giving us lightning-fast, autocomplete searches with every keystroke. This approach even allowed us to highlight search results in real-time.
There’ll be a lot more information about the technical challenges faced and overcome in our Tutorials section in the coming months.
