We’ve got a new website!

Ok, so it’s not entirely new… but it has undergone a major refresh.

Our old website was built on WordPress using the excellent Salient theme, back in the day when out-of-the-box themes were cool. Salient comes with a bunch of neat layout templates, customisation options and a Visual Editor making it easy for the non-coder to get a great looking site up & running.

However, that was over 6 years ago… and we hadn’t done much work on the site since. Mostly because we’re always too busy building great looking websites for all our partners, but also because our site was very well optimised for SEO and rankings.

Earlier this year, Google added something called Core Web Vitals to their rankings algorithms - and we saw that our Salient based site was severely lacking in one main thing…

SPEED!

Our site was slow! 😭 Not disastrously so in the real-world, but a score of 8 on PageSpeed Insights just wasn’t going to cut it in 2021 - neither for Google, nor for our visitors.

So we recoded the whole thing.

  • Salient - gone.
  • WordPress itself & all it’s plugins - gone.
  • Complex database lookups - gone.


Creative Brand Design 2.0 has been on a diet. We’ve rebuilt the site in its entirety, using good old HTML, CSS, Javascript & PHP. Thanks to our whizz dev team we’ve even managed to cut out jQuery - no easy task!

Creative Brand Design - Website Design Page

You won’t actually see a lot of changes. Under the hood, it might be a whole new beast, but visually we’ve tried to keep much of the site looking the same - with just a bit of touching up here & there.

SVG where we previously didn’t have it. Some nice new animations to help bring the content to life. A bit of polish around the typography and grid sizing to make it look super clean.

Our endeavors in optimising our website have been recognised by the team over at Outible, and it’s been listed as one of the top rated agency websites for Speed, Design & Stability. 🌟

We’ve been more actively adding to & updating our content, too. For instance, check out our new Design Page - showcasing plenty of our graphic design & logo work that we weren’t showing off before. We’re also constantly updating our Portfolio, with brand new websites that we’ve created such as Genvid.

Creative Brand Design - Portfolio Page

Our Web Design page has also been given a once-over; now you can see exactly how your project will progress through each stage, from conception to a final product. We always want to be as transparent as possible and work with you, rather than for you, to produce the best result you could hope for!

If you’ve been on our site before, you’ll probably have seen or used our Cost Estimator. We’ve updated this with our latest services and ballpark costs for 2021, so if you’re wondering how much your project might cost or considering what you want included, our handy tool might help you out. It’s not going to be absolutely spot-on - you can give us a call or drop us an email to discuss your estimate - but it will give you, and us, a good starting point.

Here at Creative Brand Design we know the importance more than anyone of having a website that’s attractive, easy to use, and fast. We think our ‘new’ site accomplishes all these things & more - we hope you agree!

Creative Brand Design - PageSpeed Score of 100

😎