Bootstrapping your startup website

There are a lot of options for your new startup’s website, it’s a decision not to be taken lightly. Your website could be the first interaction a client has with your company; it should convey your vision, culture and talents.

Our first site was built using the Shift Squarespace template. This offered us a quick, great looking website to start directing clients to.

Overtime we started to realize the limitations of the Squarespace platform. It’s a great tool for a responsive site you can easily setup, quickly integrate with payment portals, analytics and more. All these features, however, come at a lose of control over some core functionality. We have a lot of great development and design talent in house and it only made sense to put that to work on our own site.

We wanted something that wouldn’t require a large development cycle, could be built quickly to swap out with our existing site, and still offered the flexibility we wanted. After going through the options we decided to build off a responsive bootstrap template and host our site using github pages. We went with a template created by BlackRock Digital called ‘Creative’. The Creative template comes with some LESS and SCSS files pre-built depending on your preference and a pre-configured gulpfile.

After building off the template, adding our copy and content our next step was to host our site. Setting up a site on github pages is pretty straight forward, and well documented already. One challenge that took some creativity is github pages current lake of dynamic backend support. The ‘contact us’ form was initially built using php to send the form submission. Looking at solutions others have come up with we had a few options. From good to better we could, use a mailto tag, or an external service like formspree. We decided to build our own solution with a mix of firebase, heroku and some node magic. You can check out our ‘Dynamic Web Apps on GitHub Pages FOR FREE’ article for more details.

With the site complete our next step was to switch over our domain from routing to Squarespace, over to github pages. Our domain is currently hosted with Godaddy and when you integrate the two, Squarespace applies MX and CNAME record templates. Deactivating the integration from Squarespace, and then removing the applied template from Godaddy reset our domain forwarding. At this point we needed to add in the github pages records to route to our github account.

Next we need to add our CNAME record in the root of our github repository:

Committing the changes in Godaddy took around 10 minutes to propagate, the end result is our Pan Labs agency website panlabs.io

This gives us a great base to work from and allows us to add any functionality we might need as the agency grows.

Plans for the future:

• Migrate our domain from Godaddy to DNSimple
• Move from Github Pages to another host such as heroku or firebase for SSL support when using a custom domain
• Make better use of CCS pre-processing, for now it’s a bit overkill for a single page static sight like ours
• Optimize our site including images and minified code