We are very excited to announce the relaunch of the uxebu.com site and subsequently our other project sites as well!!

In this blogpost I want to give you a quick overview of the new structure, the setup, why we chose certain tech and how maybe you can draw some inspiration from our work.

Lets dive right into the nuts and bolts – a quick overview of how stuff works ^TM:

Content

In the past year a lot has happened at uxebu, new ideas were born, other ones where buried away – in essence we distilled out a concentrate of a few important factors we wanted to be reflected in the new website, while keeping some of the old ‘vibes’.

• We are a JavaScript tech company
• Our two sides of the coin are ‘business’ and ‘open source / incubator’ which we want to address much clearer
• The entire crew is what defines uxebu and we want to let that be reflected to the outside

We kept the site structure simple, basically one ‘CV’ style front-page, the team pages and our blog including articles and events.

Main focus of the front-page was to both showcase our commercial work and at the same time give insight into the open-source and incubating work we do – hopefully this distinction is clearly shown.

Tech

Our wishes for the new site are probably nothing new for most people setting up a website, but lets summarize anyways:

• Easy to maintain (preferably something like markdown)
• No CMS Xc%(*y$e(wy!!!!!!!!!!
• Support for most browsers, but no fancy tricks, if you support CSS3 gradients, good! If not, too bad
• Open source, all hosted on GitHub

These requirements resulted in us writing up a very simple markdown to HTML converter running on node.js.
Plain Markdown to HTML conversion was not enough in our case so we added the ability to define rendering blocks which you could use to map the Markdown tree to an object which then in return can be used as Mustache tags. This ensures that editing content stays super simple – I mean if you want, just browse the uxebu site on github ;)

Open source

The project is available on GitHub. If you have any questions or would like me to go into more detail on how everything works, feel free to leave a comment.

P.S.: Wait, did we just release yet another CMS ^TM ? ;) it just had to happen….