INTRODUCTION TO DREAMHOST
DreamHost has provided web hosting since 1997, which is quite a long time in the tech world. Launched in a college dorm room in Southern California, it grew into a company with hundreds of employees. They remian one of the few independent company-owned hosting services still available. They are big vocal advocates for online privacy and freedom of speech - landing them occasionally in hot water.
THE CHALLENGE
Any kind of e-commerce site knows it needs a strong website that will promote its brand and high conversion rates. DreamHost has gone through multiple versions of its site through the 20 years of being in business and this was a big company undertaking. This update was even more ambitious than our logo redesign as it is our storefront and sole source of revenue.
The company site that was in place originally was built on Wordpress. Even though it was running on the largest content management system out there, we saw few benefits for it. The site was hard to update, clunky, and slow to load. The database made it vulnerable to hackers, and other malware. From a marketing standpoint, it was hard to run promos and doing any kind of PPC (Pay-per-click) advertising since each promo page had to be updated individually. From design and branding, it was hard to do any kind of design changes because it was built on a custom theme. We needed something that was more nimble, stable, easy to customize and update.
THE SOLUTION
Along with the redesign of the site the team decided to use Jekyll as its new platform. Jekyll is a great blog-aware platform like Wordpress but a static-site generator. It doesn’t need a database to store and input data - making it harder to be hacked or defaced. Jekyll can also be built to be modular allowing you input the code in multiple pages without duplicating it. The site started to load faster because it was all static HTML files. Using markdown data files we could keep all our price points and promo dates in one place. The site was still built on templet files but we could easily experiment with a new product comparison chart or promo page. The code base is all HTML and SASS files in a well organized and structured directory.
The new site was built to promote our new brand and convert new users. The new lifestyle photography was based on the brand personas we developed for each product. We hired Magnetic for the new photography. The new site also unveiled the new branding colors we had developed along with the new logo.
