Our new website

About a week ago we launched our new website that you are seeing now, and this is the first time the website has changed since we launched it back in 2015. Since that time it's had 2 migrations for the CMS so let's talk a bit about what we used in the past.

Built on Anchor as the CMS (discontinued) the site was clean and had a design built on bootstrap. This is the same layout design we used until just a week ago. With this site we tried to keep things small and over time we wanted to integrate into other services and that made us move to our own system.

We moved everything into our own system when we created SimpleScript as a programming language. This language was created for the dashboard when we wanted to replace the dashboard back in 2018 as a way to move to a faster update cycle.

This move also changed how we did things, we used the same template but we started to integrate into the panel with linked user sessions, messages, and showing content from our community (closed).

The community was amazing but as we built it on Flarum and it was still in beta it had an upgrade problem due to abandoned plugins and things breaking between versions. So just over a year ago we chose to close the community. As it was deeply integrated into the cloud panel and website we tossed a lot of custom code and database integrations.

After we stripped the Flarum additions we had made to our website and panel we got left with a website that was a pain to update as it was static at this point. So we chose to go lean and start getting rid of pain points on our cloud panel and website until it was entirely static. This resulted in amazing performance, but it lacked one thing. Updates.

This move was a kinda work in progress for a few months, by first moving our help, status page, and other documentation over to Notion pages on our domain using CloudFlare workers to convert the pages. We found that it was great but an SEO nightmare. When we closed our community we lost almost all external links as it was a community with lots of guides and problem solving. So we got lost moving around documentation and guides from service to service but we wanted one place to call home.

Then we found out about Super. Super converts Notion pages into static websites, this was everything we ever wanted as we used Notion internal for years and it gives us the ability to update faster.

This should allow us to move faster, give more helpful information and resources, and for the first time since the community have everything under one domain again.

This is a huge step to becoming lean, and giving us time back to build an amazing service for everyone.