Refreshing Begin.com with Enhance HTML Web Components

In the ever-evolving devtools landscape, a clear message delivered through a sleek, efficient, and responsive website is table stakes. It’s not just about making a statement, it’s about demonstrating our values by providing a seamless experience for our customers no matter where they are or what device they use. That’s why we decided to rebuild our company website from the ground up, leveraging the latest performance capabilities of our open work on Enhance. The result is a great showcase of our commitment to excellence and customer-centric design.

We heard from customers that we needed a more obvious separation between Begin the company, the primary product we offer (Begin Deploy), and the open source work we do to support it (Enhance for frontend devs, the backend foundation Architect, and the aws-lite project).

Sometimes it really helps to have fresh eyes — so working with the excellent guidance of Scott Jehl in tandem with our Begin teammates Cole Peters and kj, we got down to business. Like all good design, the team started with the content, and worked backwards to a visual treatment from there. The result is beautiful visually, but also an extremely fast end user experience that remains accessible. And if you happen to be a web developer reading this: view source looks great, too.

If you like digging in, read more about the redesign on Scott’s blog here.

A Slimmer, Faster Experience Designed for Everyone

The core objective of this overhaul was to enhance the site information architecture and hierarchy without sacrificing performance and accessibility. We stripped everything down to the essentials, removing any fluff that hindered speed. By embracing HTML Web Components rendered on the backend we significantly reduced load times, and improved overall website responsiveness.

No clunky framework code weighing the user experience down. No div soup required.

Whether you’re browsing on a high-speed connection or a slower mobile network, the experience remains consistently smooth and enjoyable.The new Begin works flawlessly without JavaScript. But, when JavaScript is available, the experience is elevated with additional interactive elements and features, showcasing the versatility and adaptability of Enhance.

HTMLFirst isn’t just an abstract philosophy: it is literally how web browsers work when loading any content, and by working with the grain, we get a much smoother finish for both end users and developers.

Looking Ahead

We are committed to the best possible developer experience without sacrificing end user experience. We see this relaunch – built atop our open source projects – as another small step towards mirroring our online presence with the quality of our principles. We’re genuinely excited about the possibilities Enhance opens up, and we love how the end result looks and feels, and we are extremely proud of how things work under the hood. These details really matter.

The collaboration and creativity that went into this redesign are a testament to what’s possible when we push the boundaries of the web platform, and when we design with user needs at the forefront. But don’t just take my word for it: try out Enhance, deploy a web app with Begin, let us know what you think!