Introducing JDM10

Part of the festivities celebrating our 10th year in business, JDM Digital is thrilled to announce the launch of our redesigned website.  Don’t let its simplicity fool you.  It’s easily the most technically sophisticated site we’ve ever built — for ourselves anyway.

You might think it should be pretty easy for a digital agency specializing in web design and development to build a website for themselves.  Well, it’s not quite that simple…

“Just as doctors make the worse patients,” explains our President, Justin Downey, “web design firms make the worse clients–and we were really hard on ourselves.”

Starting with totally rewriting all the website content to better reflect who we are internally, not just how we want to be seen by others, the new site is pretty much a complete overhaul.

Click around a bit and you’ll find our portfolio has morphed into really killer case studies–not just pretty pictures of our work.

The whole site is minimalist and focuses on that content.  The only thing we didn’t mess with is our infamous “Beer” form–though the form itself got an update.

From font choices to line heights, no detail was too small to us.  Check out how the underlines on the links skip the descenders.  That’s no accident.

We also spent a lot of time on the search function (we think of search as the ultimate navigation) and rolling up our most popular content under one site (Studios and Labs are now essentially part of this main site).

Lastly, we focused extra time on myJDM, our client portal.  We can’t thank our clients enough for their great ideas for making it even better.

Talk Nerdy to Me

For our non-nerd readers, that’s pretty much all you need to know.  For the rest of you, here’s a little more background.  You know you love it when we talk nerdy to you.

We mentioned at the outset that this is possibly the most sophisticated site we’ve ever built.  A large proportion of that is due to setting out to do something awesome, but still loading in under 2 seconds.  That’s no small feat on our cheap shared hosting, but we got the site to load in just 1.08 seconds on average (often much faster).  We’ll be moving to a much faster web hosting provider soon, but we wanted a benchmark on our current shared hosting.

Aside from a fast loading site, the new JDM10 also sports:

• PWA Service Workers (so you can access it even while offline)
• Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP-up)
• Database Object Caching
• Advanced (and Automated) use of the image SRCSET attribute
• Low-Quality Image Swapping
• Anti-Spam Forms (without CAPTCHA!)
• Revamped Search Algorithm (with fuzzy-matching suggestions)
• Adaptive and Responsive Technologies
• Filter, Sort, Search, and Export Invoices and Proposals
• Automated Proposal Commenting & Approval and PDF-version Export
• Purpose-Built, Custom Plugins (if you want something done right…)
• Heavy Assets Loaded from a CDN via HTTP2
• Lots of AJAX goodness
• Forced EV SSL (because security matters)
• Syndication to Apple News
• …and much more

If you’re eager for more details on the technical stuff, stay tuned to our Insights blog.  We’ve already started writing a few posts on what we learned and how you can use some of the technology we developed building JDM10.

Over to You

We’ve kissed our baby enough.  What do you think of JDM10?  Let us know below in comments.

Hats Off

JDM10 wouldn’t have been possible without a lot of help from our friends at StackOverflow, WordPress.org, Bootstrap, Krakin, Sucuri, CSS Tricks, and many others.

Special thanks to Jenee Echard and Anthony Piccolo for all their hard (after hours) work.