Today GrailForge finally goes live with the 3rd incarnation of https://grailforge.eu.
Why a new website?
Aside from the fresh coat of paint to reflect our updated branding, one of the key goals of the new site was to lead by example. There are some things we often hear as being ‘too complicated’. ‘Too hard’. ‘Not practical’.
Do you notice something? Or more importantly, NOT notice something? The lack of annoying cookie consent popups perhaps? It’s not because we simply leave it out and hope we don’t get caught. It’s because we don’t track you. We don’t prioritise ‘telemetry’ over your privacy or user experience. We don’t use any third-party integrations that disrespect your privacy. In the instance of embedded videos, we go to exceptional lengths to ensure the likes of Google and Rumble cannot track you unless you explicitly choose to engage with their content.
It is possible to be fully GDPR-compliant without nagging cookie pop-ups (see our cookie policy for details, you just need to respect your visitors.
Another of the goals for the redesign was to make all key functionality work without any JavaScript. Fully responsive design. “Share” buttons. Language switching. Contact forms. Form validation (with visual feedback). Don’t get us wrong - we don’t hate JavaScript. It’s used extensively behind the scenes in the development and deployment of this website and it’s used in a few non-critical places like the landing page animation. It’s just not littered around carelessly at every opportunity. Some features - such as video embeds or the landing page animation - will be impossible without JavasScript enabled, but you still get something with limited functionality instead of an unhelpful wireframe placeholder, ‘dead’ buttons or a blank canvas.
Multi-language support was another important goal for the redesign. The reasons for this are two-fold. For one, being based in Sweden and with growth plans in motion in Portugal, we felt it was a matter of simple respect to offer the site in the local languages. As we take on customers in other markets, we will expand our language offering accordingly.
The second reason for prioritising multi-language support is that we’ve seen many lazy and/or broken approaches to ‘i18n’. While there are absolutely cases where it is challenging to offer multi-language support in a product (e.g. complex existing codebase not written with i18n in mind, simultaneous support of left-to-right and right-to-left languages, or products with precise layout requirements), we’ve seen many other cases there the challenges predominantly arise from a poor process or lack of discipline in maintenance. We want to show that it can be achieved even alongside the other design restrictions we’ve chosen to work with.
So what’s next?
With the website re-launched, GrailForge is now also resuming our consulting offerings. Right now we have a clean slate so if we lacked the capacity to take on your proposal in the past, now is the ideal time to reconnect.
There is still some work to be done on the website. Comments on posts are currently disabled and likely won’t be added any time soon for reasons that will be discussed in another post (spoiler: it’s related to our respect-first approach to cookies). While the blog posts are only available in English, we will be making a distinction between lengthier blog posts like this from more straightforward news and updates for our customers that will be made available in all supported languages.
We’re also pushing ahead with our open knowledge agenda. Both with this website redesign and with ongoing work on our internal projects, we’ve been finding innovative solutions to a lot of problems that are (at least to our knowledge) largely unsolved or otherwise poorly documented. Expect to see these in the form of blog posts, source code and packages (e.g. npm, nuget, pip) in the coming months.
Comments
Comments are temporarily unavailable.