A new eskdale.net — and why we rebuilt it first

We've rebuilt eskdale.net. Not a new coat of paint — a new site, on a new platform, built by us on the same system we're rolling out to clients. Here's what changed, and why it matters if you're running a business in Dumfries and Galloway.

Why rebuild at all?

The old site did its job for years. But it was built when a website was a brochure you updated a few times a year, and the things we're asked for now — a shop, 3D product views, forms that land straight in a support system — sat awkwardly on top of it.

More to the point: we were asking clients to move to something we hadn't moved to ourselves. That's not a comfortable position. So we went first.

What's actually new

Every page is editable, properly. Not "editable" in the sense of raising a ticket and waiting two days. The people who own the words can change the words, and the design stays intact while they do it.

There's a shop. We've opened it with a range of personalised gifts — photo crystals and 3D figurines — partly because people asked, and partly because it puts us on the same side of the counter as our retail clients. Selling your own products teaches you things about a checkout that reading about it doesn't.

3D you can actually turn. On the 3D and immersive web page there's a model you can spin with your mouse, and a product in the shop can carry one too. It loads only when you ask for it, because sending several megabytes to someone who just wants to see a photograph is bad manners.

Support that goes somewhere. The support form raises a real ticket rather than an email that gets lost in a busy inbox.

The unglamorous half

Most of the work nobody will ever see. Every image now tells the browser how big it is, so pages don't jump about while they load. Page titles and descriptions are checked against what a search result actually shows, rather than hoping for the best. Security headers are set. The site is measured, not guessed at.

That's the part we'd want done on your site too, and it's the part that usually gets skipped.

What this means for you

If you're a local business with a site that's five, ten or fifteen years old, you don't necessarily need a rebuild. Plenty of older sites still earn their keep. But if yours is hard to update, slow on a phone, or quietly invisible in search, those are fixable problems — and they're the ones we fix most often.

Have a look at the work we've done, or tell us what isn't working and we'll tell you straight whether it's worth doing.

The blog starts again here. Expect fewer announcements and more of what we've learned doing the job — the things that went wrong included.