Remember, a few years ago, that terrible fire that shook the French-speaking web, when an OVH data center in Strasbourg caught fire, literally launching thousands of websites into the cloud.
It turns out that gdm-pixel.com was part of the party and went up in smoke, along with 11 other of our production sites.
After a few phone calls from panicked clients (whom we were able to reassure immediately because yes, we had backups), and a short afternoon getting everything back online, we had two options:
- Put the site back online as it was
- Or use the redesign we had in progress, although it wasn’t completely finished
We opted for the second solution, telling ourselves that we would finish it quickly, within a few days.
And then… Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and finally into a year.
GDM-Pixel was more dead than alive in its final hours, but the redesign wasn’t felt as urgent because we were swamped with work, here or at Digital-Cookie, our web careers training center.
And then, finally, we decided it was time to offer a real “beautiful death” to GDM-Pixel, by completely redesigning everything we had: a (slight) change in graphic charter, refocusing on GDM-Pixel clients (goodbye tutorials, which are now all at Digital-Cookie), and above all, above all, leaving the WordPress ecosystem.
Astro.build, the Technical Crush of the Year
We had decided to redesign the site in React (a JS framework created by Facebook’s development team), and it was through some research that we discovered Astro, a Javascript framework that offered many more advantages than a React redesign:
- Possibility of server-side routing (without doing anything)
- Server-side rendering for SEO
- Integration of the View Transitions API
- Loading times at ground level
- Tailwind CSS integration
- Automatic image reformatting to WebP
There, you see ⬆️, in terms of “speed”, it’s just crazy how it nails everyone else to the post!
Why Astro Will Make a Big Difference for Us (and for You)
Well, that’s all well and good, but what do all these technical details mean?
- Less headache to have an SEO-friendly thing
- Breathtaking transition effects
- Very, very fast sites
- Super-super modern sites
In short, everything to seduce us.
To this, we can add the possibility of adding other UI components (React, Svelte, Vue, NextJS etc) and an “island” architecture allowing very fine management of element integration in the page, for even more speed.
After a few weeks of training, and a few tens of thousands of lines of code, GDM-Pixel, JS version, came out of the box where it had been languishing for the past few years.
So, very concretely, here’s what happens for you, dear clients:
- Your sites continue to run properly, we still work a lot with WordPress and Prestashop
- We continue to follow the PHP ecosystem, security news, WP updates etc
- In short, nothing to do on your side.
However, we can now offer you:
- More completely custom plugins for your sites
- Redesigns and creations under Astro
- Other services that will arrive on the site very soon (I won’t spoil, but there’s some heavy stuff)
These past years have been rich in learning, and if we weren’t making much noise, it’s because we were working hard: it’s now time to show you everything we’ve undertaken in recent months.
Stay Tuned 👀️
