When relaunching our website for the new Allcloud name, we had a few goals in mind:

1. Useful Content: Deliver relevant insights.
2. Clear Brand: Reinforce that our brand is all about the cloud.
3. Clean Design: Provide a clean, focused design.
4. Speed: Ensure the fastest performance possible.
5. Responsiveness: Optimize the site for all expected devices.

Here’s how we redesigned, built, and launched the site over two weeks in December 2016:

1. Useful Content

Content is king. Everything we do is designed to educate and help our clients benefit the most from the cloud.

Along those lines, we post monthly insights on this blog. We have plans to share additional resources, spanning documentation, scripts, and templates to drive successful projects.

2. Clear Brand

Allcloud’s architects apply exceptional breadth and depth of experience, allowing us to take on many types of projects. But we choose to focus, applying our expertise where it has the most value.

As Allcloud, our site revolves around what we can accomplish together using Azure, Office 365, and .NET-based cloud applications.

3. Clean Design

The new allcloud.com emphasizes content while using a handful of images for organization and impact. We’ve focused on bright, high-resolution images to anchor each page. This imbues each page with its own identity while minimizing clutter.

4. Speed

High performance is essential for a great experience. For the new allcloud.com, we chose Jekyll as the static site generator. This seemed like a big change from WordPress (which powered apidae.com), but was painless. As a result, adding content is faster and we have more granular control.

Every aspect of the site is optimized, using a tailored Grunt toolchain to minify all content and compress all assets. Of course, our site is hosted on Azure which delivers speedy HTTP/2 hosting. We use CloudFlare for content delivery and protection.

5. Responsiveness

We chose to optimize the site for many different form factors, spanning touch and traditional desktop devices. The allcloud.com site should look and feel natural on virtually any device, with large click targets and intuitive swiping behavior.

To accomplish this, we provide media queries optimizing the layout for every screen size multiple of 160 pixels.

We hope you enjoy browsing the new allcloud.com and find our content useful. We’d love to hear from you.