Special Kudos from CSS Design Awards

Celebrating our 10th year in business, JDM Digital launched a complete redesign of our website that’s minimalist but technically sophisticated.  Read more about JDM10 in our original announcement post.

Since then, the site has been recognized several times by organizations big and small.  Today, we’re thrilled to announce its received “Special Kudos” for our site’s UI and UX by CSS Design Awards (or CSSDA, for short).

As the team at CSSDA explains,

Special Kudos is a professional ‘pat on the back’ for exemplary work that deserves recognition.  A special commendation for noteworthy websites.

Justin Downey, JDM Digital President, had this to say,

Though thrilled to be awarded Special Kudos by such a prestigious organization, I’m a little disappointed by the judges’s final scores.  The site is intentionally very minimalist, but there’s a LOT of innovation and technical sophistication going on behind the scenes and out of the user’s way — which is a lot harder than it sounds.

You might be wondering what “technical sophistication” Justin is referring to?  We did.  Well, here are a few bullet points with links to articles we’ve posted with more details.

• The whole site is actually a Progressive Web App (PWA).
• Service Workers allow the site to be accessed–even when you’re offline.
• The site uses Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) which prime the PWA cache (aka AMP-Up).
• Automatically caches database objects to limit queries and decrease server response time.
• Modern use of inline SVG for all icons and WebP formats for images.
• Advanced (and automated) use of the image SRCSET attribute with lazy-loaded, low-quality image swapping to save mobile bandwidth.
• All web forms use “Invisible CAPTCHA,” an anti-spam technology we literally invented. (Technical paper coming soon.)
• Killer site search algorithm, with fuzzy-matching suggestions, like “Did you mean…?”
• Adaptive and responsive mobile-first technologies so it looks great on ALL devices.
• Link underlines skip descenders, because typography is cool!
• Client Portal, myJDM, comes with advanced account management, online payments, and much more.
• Custom-built WordPress plugins to keep functionality out of the theme and because we wanted it done right.
• Heavy assets (JS, CSS, Images, Videos, etc.) loaded from a CDN via HTTP2 to drastically decrease latency.
• Forced EV SSL on all pages, because security matters.
• Our Insights blog automatically syndicates content to Apple News as well as to an automated HTML email newsletter.
• Every inch of the site is customizable from the WordPress admin.
• Custom CSS-only loading graphic (fingers tapping) detects each element’s state using Pace.js.
• Critical-path CSS is automatically inlined in the header for performance without unnecessary FOUC.
• Automated security, lossless image compression, and SO much more…

What do you think of JDM Digital v10?  After all, we built it for you, not for judges.  Let us know in comments below.