How we built the new condu.co website

Step 1: What are our platforms and what do our users expect?

For us, as a company that helps start-ups and other businesses build digital products, our own website is definitely the most important platform. A company that builds digital products but doesn’t have its own website does come across as somewhat untrustworthy. There are certainly other companies these days that downplay the value of having their own website. Particularly with other digital platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter or XING, one might be tempted to say that one’s own website is now merely a summary content hub for the individual platforms, taking a back seat in terms of communication.

In our view, however, this is a fallacy: it is clear that social media platforms are now an indispensable part of the communications mix. Conversely, though, relying exclusively on social media platforms and the quality of their algorithms is a risk for a business. Of course, there are many brands that would not exist without Instagram, YouTube and the like. However, we do not consider it sustainable to tie one’s own business survival exclusively to the relevance, reach and functioning of another company.

The key question when designing the site was: How can we ensure our own platform remains relevant amongst the mix of other platforms without becoming repetitive? To this end, we considered what defines social networks and what defines websites:

Networks have their own native content formats

These can be posts, photos or videos. What these formats have in common is that they can be consumed quickly. The platforms optimise their newsfeed algorithms so that users can consume as much relevant content as possible in a short space of time. The key terms here are ‘’ and ‘snackable content’ : this refers to content that is easy to consume and appears ‘light’. The advantage for users of such formats is that they can consume a lot of content, and if a piece of content does not match their interests, it can be skipped quickly and easily. And this also plays into the hands of social media platforms, as for them content relevance is an important parameter for keeping users on their own app for as long as possible.

Websites contain a wealth of information

Websites have a reputation for being the complete opposite of social media when it comes to the ‘snackability’ of their content. Websites are often completely overloaded with information and lack user guidance to walk users through the site. Another problem here is that these websites are often designed not only for human users , but also for non-human users . This refers to search engine bots. Many websites operate on the principle that ‘more is more’ and overload their pages with content in order to provide every search engine bot with content on every possible topic. This is entirely understandable, because a website that cannot be found has no reason to exist. It is the users who are left to struggle with this flood of content.

When we look at the analysis of social media platforms and websites, it becomes clear that they tend to be quite different from one another. And that’s a good thing! In our approach, we aim to use social media platforms and their native content formats to make our offering more relevant. However, as we believe that not all content can be presented in a ‘snackable’ format, we use our own website to provide more in-depth context.

That in itself is not a world first or an innovation. What sets our concept apart from others, however, is that we have designed our website with an ‘’ adaptive level of detail . But what is that? Our website is based on two starting points:

• Via direct access or a search engine link . As a rule, users are not yet familiar with our company and need more context regarding the relevance of what we offer
• Via a link on a network such as , users are already familiar with our content from the network and can find out more about a specific topic.

This means that the website must adapt to users’ needs in terms of content depth. For this reason, we have designed landing pages – which users tend to access via search engines or direct links – as ‘snackable’ content that is easy to consume and quickly conveys an impression. Subpages go into greater depth and, thanks to this depth of content, function as standalone pages; but above all, they are designed for users coming from social media networks, enriching the ‘snackable’ content from those networks with further relevant information.

Step 2: What technology will we use to build the website?

Of course, a website only works once it has been technically implemented. At present, there are essentially two options for the technical implementation of a website: firstly, the website can be programmed from scratch using traditional methods. In contrast, page builders such as Wix.com, Jimdo and WebFlow are increasingly becoming a viable alternative to building a website entirely from scratch.

The advantage of page builders is obvious: a website can be set up quickly without requiring significant developer resources. Particularly in times when speed is of the essence and the site needs to be tested with real users, page builders offer a time advantage over in-house development.

On the other hand, the range of functions offered by page builders is often more limited than the possibilities offered by a bespoke solution. Given our approach, we have opted for a middle ground: behind the scenes, we use Storyblok, a so-called ‘headless content management system’, which supplies our site with content. The advantage of a headless content management system is that, unlike a conventional CMS such as Typo3 or WordPress, it is platform-agnostic. This means that the same data source can supply multiple platforms. As we have integrated our website with social networks and content can be delivered platform-independently, we now have a central hub where content can be created and distributed across the various platforms.

We built the website using Gatsby and ReactJS. By combining this with Amazon Web Services as our hosting provider, we’ve achieved fast loading times on every device and a clear, straightforward user experience. Thanks to the technical architecture of ReactJS and the use of Storyblok as the backend, we were able to launch our website within four days.

Step 3: Test, test, test

Even the best website is of no use if it isn’t used. That’s why we decided to develop the website at as a minimum viable product (MVP) . In this way, we’ve implemented the site’s basic functions and are now at the stage where we can use the first release to test what our users expect from our site.

For this reason, our website will continue to evolve over the coming weeks and months, offering new insights. All of this will be shaped by your feedback.

If you have any feedback for us or if you think something is missing from our website, we’d be delighted if you could email us at hello@condu.co you write.