Astro is our preferred front-end platform
We’re not usually ones for welding ourselves to a platform or technology, aside from web standards like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Part of what makes us so effective here is we will work with any platform that needs to be worked with as long as that platform isn’t at odds with a high performance website or app.
Astro wins over its nearest competitor, Next.js for this exact reason. They both effectively do the same thing as each other — they’re a JavaScript-based framework for building websites and web apps — but Astro does this without hundreds of kilobytes of JavaScript in the browser, which in itself is problematic, when you consider that it’s highly likely JavaScript will not be available to your users.
Astro can also be deployed pretty much anywhere you want it to be, especially if you use it as a Static Site Generator (SSG), because the output is mostly HTML files in folders. Any web host can serve that to your users.
We don’t choose this platform lightly
Over the last few years in the studio, we’ve used Astro to build good ol’ fashioned simple websites, complex brand delivery systems, successful publishing systems, expansive content management integrations and design systems. Not just design system-powered websites, I should add here, but full service, bespoke design system software.
All of these projects — some of which are massive, complex systems — have a tiny footprint, render extremely fast and work for everyone, thanks to our red lines around performance, accessibility and reliability.
We’ve been through plenty of other platforms trying to achieve similar results over the years and nothing has remained as consistently useful as Astro has. For that reason, it has become our default.
It’s also a platform that truly scales with demand
We work in iterative cycles here, so a platform that can be extremely effective at the start, when projects tend have much simpler foundations, and still be incredibly effective as complexity, traffic and demand drastically increase (in response to the work we do, of course) is incredibly valuable to a team like ours.
Because of this, Astro is right at the top of the list of our recommended software to clients at the start of projects. Like I said earlier in this article, we’ll generally work in any environment and with any software, because we’re a flexible agency, but we’ll certainly make sure that Astro isn’t the best fit first.