Revamping the website
When a design of the website was decided, we started looking into the issues of now old website. That was essentially a React template, without much consideration about data update, performance and analytics. After some research we decided to go with the wonderful relatively very new framework ‘Astro’. Astro was very intuitive to learn and adapt, with some minor hiccups.
Why Astro
Astro is purpose built for the static websites. By default Astro ships zero JavaScript to the client. which means the interactivity is completely controllable, which gives an immense performance boost compared to other frameworks. Then the most fascinating feature of Astro is ‘Islands’. They are self-contained, and interactive JavaScript parts of the site which the developer has to opt-in. This gives granular control over which part of the site must have JavaScript.
Another major factor is performance. The build output is a static website. Which loads almost instantly when properly optimised. One thing we thought we will miss is the smooth navigation of Single Page Applications, but Astro surprised us with their Client Router, which compliments the View Transition API of Web Browsers. We were hesitant to use View Transition APIs, as the browser support was poor. Firefox only got support in the January 2026.
CMS or Non-CMS
One of the tough choice we had to make was whether to use a Content Management System (CMS) or not. Astro has a full fledged system that can act similar to a CMS, just by utilising Markdown files and other assets. Also we understood that primarily developers are going to update the content in the case of a startup like us. So We decided not to add the overhead of a CMS, but go with simple markdown files, at least at the beginning. Once the content get sufficiently large and complicated, the migration can be done, which should not cause much issues.
Design
Yeah, we went ahead with the current trend. Dark theme was a difficult choice to convince and the current color schemes of us kind of fell flat on a lighter background. So we decided to give dark theme a try. The most difficult part while designing and developing was meeting WCAG 2.2 standards. This part is still a work in progress. We decided to not to go extravagant with animations, but focus on subtle movements, that will attract the attention, and will not distract when it not focused on a near by area. Again this is a work in progress, and there are a lot of improvements needed.
Frosted glass backgrounds were also a tough decisions. With very bright content under, the readability is usually affected. This will also need to be improved further.
Development
As this is an internal project, we couldn’t complete the development at a high pace, or even in a single stretch. Due to other workloads the entire development got stalled for several months. This was difficult, because rolling out this website design is important for our sales and marketing.
Astro was fun to learn. but there were some odd things that questioned out sanity. Mainly how hydration works and also the DOM swapping of Astro. Even the addEventListener turned out to be some what confusing. Also how the JavaScript code can be written targeting server side rendering and client side interactivity. But overall the approach feels very modern, compared to the giants like React and Angular. It is very close to Vue and Svelte, but with clear focus on for what purpose the framework should be used.
What’s next?
Well, this is a very minimal site at this point. We want o add more functionalities, showcasing what we are capable and what our approaches are. This is a long term project we want to focus more in this year. Hopefully the team will find time to add more content posts, and other uses.