Case study: this website

The problem

A software consultancy's own website has to do two jobs at once. It has to prove that we can build fast, accessible sites — and it has to be cheap and simple to run, because our time is better spent on client work than on our own website.

The usual answers fail one of the two. A page builder is cheap to run but proves nothing about our engineering. A hand-maintained site proves a lot but costs attention forever.

What we built

This site. Every page is a Markdown file with a few lines of frontmatter, and the build turns them into static HTML. There is no server rendering, no database, and no CMS to keep patched.

• Content in Markdown, with a typed contract for what frontmatter a page may declare: id, title, description, menu order, calls to action.
• One design system, expressed as a UnoCSS configuration rather than stylesheets, so the type and spacing scale is identical across templates and there are no bespoke CSS files to drift apart.
• Two languages, a generated sitemap and robots policy, and structured data for the organisation and each page.

Where it runs

Static files behind Caddy, with fingerprinted assets cached immutably and the entry files revalidated. Serving a few megabytes of pre-built HTML costs almost nothing, and with no runtime there is nothing to attack.

The result

• Every page is a static file; nothing is rendered per request.
• 195 KB of JavaScript and 34 KB of CSS, gzipped, against budgets of 250 KB and 60 KB. Those budgets are enforced: a change that pushes past them fails the build rather than being discovered in the field.
• Accessibility, best practices and SEO: 100 in the last verification run, across 39 pages. Performance measured 90 in Lighthouse's mobile run, where what remains is the application framework, not the content.
• A new page is one Markdown file. The same content serves both languages.
• The generator behind it is open source: simsustech/simple-site-generator.

Want a site like this? Get in touch.