PortaBase

New market, new website

Portabase started out targeting the childminder market, but decided to move to the childcare market for which they needed a new website to accompany this move. Over the course of two meetings and after taking inspiration from competitors as well as other contemporary websites, I came up with a modern and original design, combining photography with fresh colors and patterns, successfully targeting both markets. Keeping the design simple, the content concise and prioritizing a focus on primary actions, the website has proven successful in creating conversions for the company.

Team skills

Collaborating with the team of Portabase proved a breeze, as they turned out to be skilled full-stack developers. With tools like Gitlab, we kept our versions up to date and Docker helped us to quickly set up environments, allowing me to work remotely from my own office in Amsterdam.

The final result is a fully adaptive, modern website, with a design that will be relevant for many more years to come.

Grid system magic

Before this project, I never found much use for grid systems. I tried incorporating one into Zaaksysteem.nl, but I ended up disposing of it, as I needed to customize it too much for the complex interfaces I was building. For this website, I chose to give it another shot, and I must say I’m very happy I did.

At the time I was working a lot with flexbox and loved its flexibility, so I chose to use Flexboxgrid. Flexboxgrid allows you to quickly create layouts with the help of flexbox and a plethora of classes with predefined widths and margins in percentages. This way the interface can be built up quickly and can easily be modularised and restructured. Inevitably some customizations were necessary, but because of the extensive possibilities of the library, they could be kept to a minimum.