Kind
Making the world better, one website at a time!
Kind is a small but powerful team bringing together strategy, information architecture and digital expertise to drive change, and be a force for good.
Three sites, one agency
I built Kind’s own website three times over about five years. The first two ran on Craft CMS. The third doesn’t run on anything.
An agency site is a shop window. It changes when the work changes, which for a small team is a few times a month rather than a few times an hour. By the third rebuild it was clear the CMS was carrying very little weight for the cost of running it.
Two of them ran on Craft
The earlier versions were Craft builds, and Craft was the right answer at the time. The team wanted to publish posts and case studies without asking a developer, and Craft’s editing experience is hard to beat for that.
What changed wasn’t Craft. It was that the content settled down. Pages were being edited by people perfectly comfortable opening a pull request, and the database spent most of its time serving content that hadn’t moved in months.
The third one didn’t need a CMS
Hugo generates the site as static HTML, Vite bundles the assets, and Tailwind keeps the CSS to what is actually used. Merging to main builds and deploys it.
Static, start to finish
Hugo builds every page ahead of time, so a request is answered by a file rather than a database query.
Ship only what is used
Tailwind strips unused CSS at build, so the stylesheet describes the site as built rather than the framework it came from.
Deploy on merge
Merging to main builds the site and deploys it to Netlify, with Cloudflare in front. For a small team that removes the release ritual entirely.
Light on purpose
Kind are a B Corporation and a 1% For The Planet member. Fewer bytes over the wire is the cheapest environmental win a website has, and it makes the site quicker for everyone.
Alt text as a first-class citizen
Accessibility on most sites stops at “the images have alt attributes”. On Kind’s, the alt text is written to be read: “A giant friendly hand, holding a small flower”, or “Two young women look at each other. They appear to be at an outdoor festival, with the sun setting in the distance. They are smiling.”
That is a content decision as much as a technical one, and it only holds up if the build makes it easy to do and awkward to skip.
