The brief
Fiona reached out to me after spending quite a lot of time trying to get a website up and running herself. After nearly a year of running her business without a website, and getting frustrated with off-the-shelf WordPress themes, I was asked to help design and build a custom website for SparkIT that met the businesses approach to sustainable IT.
The outcome
I began by mocking up a few layouts for the pages of the website, taking into account the new branding and colours Fiona had just had done, as well as the supplied content. After signing off the homepage, we went through a couple of minor iterations of the remaining page designs before moving into the development stage.
I hand-coded the WordPress theme to my low-carbon standards. With a lightweight SCSS approach to the styling, SVG elements where possible, only the necessary JavaScript, and responsive imagery using modern image formats. Additionally, I added a little scroll-based interaction on the homepage without using any JavaScript. A pleasing lightweight enhancement to the page.
Alongside this work, I also simplified the admin controls and ran optimisations on the WordPress CMS. Removing some default loading scripts and styles.
Further optimisations took place once the website was live, to add dynamic image generation for modern image formats, as well as both sever-side and font-end caching.
The website is hosted with 100% renewable energy on Infomaniak, making this website lightweight on both the browser and the planet.