The site is online here.
After some billing and support issues with our hosting providers the CASE lab (I) decided to ditch MissHosting and WebFlow for something cheaper, lighter and more maintainable. There were two primary problems to solve:
- An entire website builder is ridiculously overkill for a static site that's built once and updated a few times per year. The site needs to be rebuilt in something else
- A different host was needed that would also continue working once I left. Self hosting was due to network policies not an option.
I decided to go with the Astro web framework which I use for component composition and media optimisation, which generates static pages that are then hosted on Cloudflare workers. Cheaper (free) and faster. And if everything breaks, we just need to host a couple of static generated files.
The actual page is built in plain HTML/CSS with minimal JS. Doing full progressive enhancement felt overkill for the purpose of the page, but the primary pages should not need JS to function. Doing a responsive layout is not that diffcult if you don't complicate it and keep function over form. With CSS and flexbox nowadays it's difficult to go wrong. The actual content and design is mostly cloned from the old site, so I might do a visual overhaul eventually.
The only page that actually needs JS is the component browser, which had to be reimplemented due to rather unclear dependencies and data sources of the original one.