Making updates to your website can be a daunting task, especially if your site has advanced filtering features or a unique display of content. Certain changes may require manual updates to many areas across the site and may break your desired flow of information. We aim to simplify this process through the use of automation, which creates powerful editing tools that can address the specific requirements of each client.

We used automation to create a more powerful content management experience in a recent website we built for Flybridge Capital Partners, a Seed-stage venture capital firm based in Boston and NYC. The main feature of their new website is the “Community” page, where they showcase hundreds of their portfolio companies, company founders, and investors -- all organized in an interactive grid. Flybridge needed to frequently reorganize this grid based on which portfolio companies they wanted to publicize. With many filtering options and hundreds of people to showcase, our challenge was to create a simple way for our client to manage the grid, without needing to reorganize everything manually.

Defining the Rules

In order to sort the grid automatically and programatically, we needed some rules to follow. Flybridge mapped out exactly how they wanted the people in the grid to be sorted:

1. The first people in the grid should be the founders and investors of companies that have had recent major updates.
2. The founders of a company should be sorted alphabetically, and then should be followed by their investors, who are also sorted alphabetically.
3. Investors should only appear once, with the first company in the grid that they’ve invested in.
4. Each of the Flybridge partners should appear within the first 3 rows of the grid.
5. Founders and investors of companies that are not part of the main Flybridge fund should only appear after the first 4 rows.

Strategically Building Automation

Using these rules, we created an algorithm that processes the data that Flybridge provides in their content management system and automatically sorts the grid to their specifications. Additionally, we generate a unique page for each person in the grid, which features their individual community of fellow founders and investors. To ensure all pages still load lightning fast for the end user, we utilized GatsbyJS as a static-site generator. This tech stack allows the entire sorting process to occur during “build-time” and not on the user’s browser -- dramatically improving site loading speed. With this entire process automated, our client can spend less time managing their website and more time focusing on what matters.

We create and integrate automation on almost all of our projects and for many different use cases. It allows our clients to quickly publish new blog posts, populate existing pages with relevant content, generate new product pages and reorganize site layouts -- all without touching code or creating new designs.

If you’re interested in how automation can speed up your digital workflow, get in touch at studio@15finches.com.

About Us

15 Finches a startup-focused creative studio with a rich history of executing high-quality branding, marketing campaigns, web design, web development, UI/UX and product strategy for B2B and B2C startups.

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