Pixite

Midway through my first year at Pixite we decided it was time for a new website. The work we were delivering had outgrown what our site was showing, so we partnered with a specialised design agency to help elevate the brand and design to something worthy of where we were at. Development was solely on my shoulders, and this was not a small build.

The site is highly interactive, originally built with heavy use of GSAP animations and Spline for 3D elements. As an agency site, this was about going all out and showing what we can do when we take the limits off. The catch was that we were building this alongside ongoing client work, so the timeline was tight for the scale of the project and the amount of content that needed to be created. The whole team pitched in where they could, but development was my responsibility and it was a big undertaking.

Since launch I've gone back through the site with more experienced hands and given it a proper spring clean. I stripped out the GSAP in favour of pure CSS scroll-driven animations, which cleaned up a lot of what I can now see were rough edges in the original implementation. We'd actually had to remove the Spline 3D animations part way through last year because of the performance hit, but the gains from moving to CSS animations gave us enough headroom to bring them back without noticeable degradation. The housekeeping has also brought the site more in line with how the brand has evolved as the team has grown from five to eight, with more creatives who have each brought their own flair.

When I first built this site I thought we were pushing the upper limits of what WordPress could handle. Diving back in to refine it, I've realised that not only have I grown a lot as a developer, but even where we are pushing those limits, I'm now able to do it in a way that feels much more elegant in its execution.