The new Perch website

It has been a busy week. Here at Perch HQ we are thrilled with the reaction to Perch 2 and also very excited about some of the new things we’ll be adding to the really little CMS very soon.

Along with the new version of the product we also decided to refresh the Perch website and our documentation. The previous Perch website hadn’t changed significantly since launch and so was starting to look a bit dated. We also had a mixture of marketing information and support materials on the site, leading people to miss useful information such as our video tutorial when exploring the docs.

In retrospect, completely rebuilding the site and documentation at the same time as preparing a major release of our product added a lot of stress to the process. We do feel the end result was worth it.

The new Perch website was designed by the very talented Paddy Donnelly of Lefft, working with our existing Perch bird illustrations created by Kev Adamson. We asked Paddy to help us get away from our tendency to write lots of words, and instead to create a more visual introduction to Perch. The intention being to point people to the documentation if they want to read implementation detail or watch a video about a certain feature.

We also wanted the site to be responsive, as we get a lot of traffic from mobile devices. We see a huge spike in mobile traffic when we sent out an email to our mailing list. Many people read mail on their mobile and so click through the links on that device.

We love the new design. We feel it still looks like Perch, but a more polished Perch, which is what we have aimed for with the product itself. We’re growing, learning from your feedback and trying to refine what we do and we hope you like the new site as much as we do. If you have any suggestions as to what should be on the site, we would of course love to hear them.