We're pleased to announce the launch of our new website, powered by Astro, Payload CMS, and Tailwind. We're coming from a Gatsby.JS / Styled-Components / Markdown Content powered build for our previous site. Aesthetically, we wanted to take our original minimalistic design, and dress it up a bit more to a design with some more life breathed into it, in line with our nature inspired brand. Here's a brief dive into our design refresh!
The Tech Stack
We originally chose Gatsby.JS because of it's ability to produce static website from React code, essentially combining a great developer experience with extremely performant production websites. You'd get the benefit of designing the site from a React component oriented perspective, without the drawbacks of using traditional React for websites that weren't apps (poor SEO in particular).
We chose Astro as our static site generator as a natural successor to Gatsby which has been winding down support for several years now. We're also experimenting with a more capable CMS compared to simple markdown pages we had previously. Payload CMS is highly customizable, and is an educational stepping stone in our mission to build our own CMS. Finally our frontend / CMS stack are entirely auto orchestrated by a CI/CD pipeline built with AWS and Github Actions.
The Design
Our own design aesthetic is a sort of "natural minimalism" featuring motifs of the Red Clover plant, leafy green colours, on white or very light pastel backdrops with the strongest red clover pink used for Call to Action banners or buttons.
The Mission
The key business goal driving our website revamp, is to broaden the scope of services we directly market; Red Clover Software Services primarily develops B2B websites, however we're increasingly working on non-website solutions, custom software integrations, game / rich media projects, and more!