August 26, 2024

5 Lessons From The Stacks Website

“The artist is a collector… Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.” - Steal Like An Artist, Austin Kleon

Intro

Stacks is the first L2 scaling solution for Bitcoin. The aim of this website is to inspire and inform. As the value of a blockchain is proportional to it’s number of users, the key aim of the website is to inspire developers to build things that people will use.

Style

The design team chose to opt for a beautiful design that shows a level of production value that signals to a developer that Stacks is a serious platform with considerable resources.
Notably, it has very few animations or interactions. When combined with such a beautiful design, it makes for a very easy to navigate and pleasing website. Although I do think that there is scope for some micro interactions.

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I’m also a fan of the bento grid with subtle background effects. This look has risen in popularity in recent years and I think rightfully so. The user gets to enjoy tasteful details that don’t detract from the key message.

Looks are great but it’s also important for a website to be fast to ensure that user’s have the best experience, stay on the website and boost the websites SEO ranking. Diving into Lighthouse we can see that the performance and accessibility need to be improved. I was surprised to see the performance so low seeing as there aren’t any videos or pictures on the website.

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Diving into the diagnostics it’s clear that there is a simple fix. The orange bitcoin illustration is served in .png format and it’s set to lazy load. Compressing the image in .webp format and setting it to auto load should boost the performance of the page alot. A simple fix in Webflow.

Marketing Stack

Analytics

With the rise of big tech and privacy concerns, more companies are opting for privacy first alternatives to google analytics. Google sell your data to pay for your analytics data, whereas other platforms let you pay up front to guarantee privacy of user data.

Analysing stacks.co on builtwith.com shows that the team have opted to use Plausible and Fathom analytics. As you might expect, I’ve noticed this trend on a lot of crypto websites and I expect it to continue.

Stacks.co have opted to use Beehiiv for their email newsletter.

CMS & Hosting

The team have opted to use Webflow to build and maintain the website. Webflow is a no-code HTML & CSS editing platform that empowers developers & designers to build fully custom websites with a visual editor. It’s the tool we use at weboaf and I believe it is a tool that will continue to grow dominance despite competition from platforms like Framer because of how well you can add custom code to it.

Docs

Most software platforms that have information for developers use GitBook to share docs on a subdomain, in this case https://docs.stacks.co/. I’m interested in exploring this trend and using GitBook for other companies with lots of information to share. It’s such a great way to present and keep information updated.

Takeaways

All in all I think this is a great website & there’s lots of inspiration to be taken. I’m especially interested in the user privacy focused alternatives to Google Analytics.