Many people have been working very hard on it and it's all looking rather nice. But, as I said before, the site launch isn't the end—it's just the beginning.
There are some obvious next steps: fixing bugs, adding content, tweaking copy, and, oh yeah, that whole "testing with real users" thing. But there's also an opportunity to have some fun on the front end. Now that the site is out there in the wild, there's a real incentive to improve its performance.
Off the top of my head, these are some areas where I think we can play around:
- Font loading. Right now the site is just using
@font-face. A smart font-loading strategy—at least for the body copy—could really help improve the perceived performance. - Responsive images. A long-term solution will require some wrangling on the back end, but I reckon we can come up with some way of generating different sized images to reference in
srcset. - Service worker. It's a no-brainer. Now that the Clearleft site is (finally!) running on HTTPS, having a simple service worker to cache static assets like CSS, JavaScript and some images seems like the obvious next step. The question is: what other offline shenanigans could we get up to?
I'm looking forward to tinkering with some of those technologies. Each one should make an incremental improvement to the site's performance. There are already some steps on the back-end that are making a big difference: upgrading to PHP7 and using HTTP2.
Now the real fun begins.
This was originally posted on my own site.
Read the next blog post about the new site and rebrand: Take a closer look at the patterns in our language - by Ellen de Vries.