The 2hD website
We wanted a place where we could talk about our practice, projects and new design ideas. We also needed an online presence to communicate with prospective clients and collaborators. We created this website.
As well as creating an elegant and flexible platform to communicate about our practice, we designed this website with the following principles in mind:
- Adding or editing the content of this website should be easy, whether we wanted to add a new project to our portfolio or share a design idea.
- All of us were already using great online services to share content on the web (Flickr, Twitter, Posterous, Delicious, etc.), so rather than reinventing the wheel, the site should serve as a hub to share these things with prospective clients and collaborators.
- Being big supporters of the Open-Source movement, we wanted to base the development of this site on open-source web technology. In addition to the vibrant support we got from the users’ community, it was also an opportunity for us to give back by helping to develop the tools we used.
- To reflect our practice ethos, the website should be a model of online accessibility, while promoting the latest standards in web design.
Since its creation in 2008, this website has become an essential platform to connect with potential clients, contact new collaborators and reach out to our community.
Designing this website from scratch was also an excellent way to experiment with ideas about making information engaging and accessible, a notion at the core of 2hD’s design philosophy.
Find out more about our web design services…
I am very impressed with how these architects market and present themselves in the world…
Kieran Gaffney, Konishi Gaffney architects, Edinburgh
Under the hood
The system running this website is a flexible open-source content management system called TextPattern that we customised and extended to match the specific needs of our website.
Here’s what powers it:
- Textpattern to flow our content
- LessCSS to create spotless, standard-compliant and easy to maintain CSS styling
- jQuery to make things interactive
Other cool web bits we’re mashing up:
- Twitter, where we post updates about what we do
- Flickr to manage our photos
- Posterous to manage our workshop blog
- Delicious bookmarks to share links we find useful
We like to handcraft everything on this site, to keep things flexible and easy to maintain. This makes it a breeze to expand our website as we develop our design practice.
Here are some of our favourite tools to do the job:
- Coda to hand-code this site and keep files in order
- Sequel Pro to juggle with the data
- Photoshop to make things pretty
- Categories
- Web design
- Client
- 2hD (that's us!)
- Location
- Nottingham, UK
- Progress
- Online since 2008
- Link
- This website
