Educe Website

Reboot of the studio website using a flat-file CMS.

During my time as an Interaction Designer at Educe Design & Innovation, the team took some time to update the studio website. The old site was built using WordPress, and a popular theme was adapted to fit the studio’s functional needs and visual aesthetics. Over time, however, the website increasingly caused issues such as slow loading times, limited flexibility, and regular downtime. After some research, we identified WordPress as the culprit.

We decided to do a complete reboot of the website using a different CMS and update projects, service descriptions, and the site’s visual design in the progress. While the reboot of the website as a whole was a team effort, the task of implementing it was given to me.

For the CMS, I decided to use Grav, a lightweight, flat-file CMS which greatly improves the speed of the website. Inside Grav, I built a custom theme, which allowed me to build the front-end according to the design specs provided by the Educe team, rather than relying on a page builder plugin. Additionally, Grav allows you to easily adapt the functionality of the back-end through your theme. I used this to remove unnecessary fields and to add page-specific functionalities, which reduces visual clutter and streamlines website management. A core feature I added to the back-end, is the ability to customize the layout of individual rows, which greatly improves the theme’s visual flexibility. The theme itself is managed as a GitHub project, making version control smooth and reliable.

A core feature of the back-end is a small layout option, which allows you to customize the layout of individual rows, thus greatly improving the theme’s visual flexibility.