Background

Casaview Homes are a reasonably well known building company in Sydney. They had an internal designer who was working on a new website design, but needed some development support to build it.

As their brand focuses on quality, they needed both their website’s design and performance to reflect this value.

They wanted to be able to use their website to show their home design options, potentially at display home sites around Sydney.

They also were planning on updating the site a lot, and needed a very intuitive backend experience.

Strategy

We worked with the designer to help them refine their ideas and designs, making the end result sharper and more cohesive.

Based on the push for a highly performing site, we determined that WordPress (with it’s significant database usage) could potentially have a negative impact on the performance. And the whole reliance on plugins and continuous updating could have even further impact.

Rather than risking it, we decided to go with a completely custom build, using a flat file CMS system. This would keep the site performing fast (as long as our code was good – which it would be).

Filtering was going to be a key aspect of the site, and we’d custom develop the filtering system to make sure it would deliver the performance we were aiming for.

Solution

We coded the entire front end from scratch, with a focus on keeping our codebase ultra clean. We then built the backend in Kirby CMS, with a totally custom interface.

With almost every piece of code being custom, we were able to keep the performance ultra snappy as well as reducing the ongoing maintenance needs to a minimum level.