High Velocity, Low Friction: The Strategy Behind Our New Website
Superthread founder David shares the process of building a website in 30 days, focusing on speed, approachable design, and conveying the power of a unified 'Tasks + Docs' workspace.
Feb 16, 2023
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David Hasovic
Why Building a Website is Harder Than It Looks
Building a website is really hard. We wanted to create a design that didn't look like one of these dark crypto sites. We just wanted to create something that was actually nice, approachable, simple, and welcoming to everybody, not just to 'super cool' people. I believe we managed to achieve that.
One thing I'm particularly pleased about is how it looks on mobile. It’s nice to read, easy to navigate, and very approachable. We did the whole thing in one month with about four people involved: myself overseeing it, a designer, an illustrator, and a content writer.
It’s About the Message, Not the Code
When you're creating a website, it's not really about doing the HTML and the CSS; it's about really knowing what kind of message you want to portray about your company to the outside world.
We decided to portray Superthread as it really is: a really simple-to-use issue tracker that has tasks and docs in the same place. It can be used by the whole team, not just by clever developers or product managers.
Conveying Speed and Functionality
Superthread is very, very fast. We have thought about speed from the bottom up maniacally, from the back end to the front end.
Local-First Speed: When you create a checklist item, it's written to RAM first and then optimistically updated behind the scenes.
High-Performance Docs: Our public pages are 10x faster than Notion, and we wanted to convey that.
Functional Screenshots: Nobody reads much text these days. We spent a long time curating screenshots that are functional inside our app to show this ease of use.
Organization and Flexibility
As well as tasks and docs, we wanted to show off Spaces. This is how we organize stuff, Spaces contain boards and nested pages that you can move up and down.
We believe that the way you organize your team should be your choice, not restricted by the software. Superthread allows you to create different zoom levels:
CEO level
Product Manager level
Engineering/Developer level
Designer level
Everybody can look at their different level in any way they want, without being concerned about the complexity underneath or above.
Search and Integrations
Everything is under the same roof, tasks, docs, boards, and spaces. You can search for a term and find everything, using your keyboard to navigate to and open it in under 50 milliseconds.
We also focused on our integrations with Slack, GitHub, and Zapier, along with our best-in-class Trello and Jira importers.
Velocity as a Culture
Building a new site takes a lot of discussion, debates, and organizing. We did it in a month, which is not too bad. I’m really pleased with the process because it reflects the velocity of our team. We have this consistent velocity and throughput in how we build features, and the website was no different.
Check it out at superthread.com, especially the mobile view. It looks fast and best-in-class.
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