We had a chat with Rye and Beyond, and there were a couple of things they wanted to make changes to or add to their site. Whilst they were at it, we added a couple of things to future proof the site. These included:

• Adding internationalisation
• Making the CMS easier to use
• Moving to Nuxt to enable us to update the site to Vue 3 when possible
• Improving the performance of their site

Rye and Beyond have many people from countries in Europe looking to come to Sussex and stay in their vibrant and welcoming holiday homes, and they wanted to make it easier for them to book. With the increasing popularity of people visiting the areas overseas, Rye and Beyond felt it essential to add internationalisation to the website - so that's exactly what they asked us to do 🎉.

As well as wanting an internationalised website, there were some other frustrations they had with their old Netlify CMS- one being unable to upload multiple images at once. Images are an essential part of Rye and Beyond to showcase their beautiful properties. However, the image sizes are often relatively large and take a while to upload; therefore, finding any time-saving step important, multiple image uploads was necessary for them. Here's a video of the language switcher:

We decided it was best to rebuild the website and move from Netlify CMS to Strapi to support internationalisation and a better content editing experience. The timing was perfect as Strapi had just released a new update that included internationalisation. We did a blog post tutorial on how to achieve this a little while ago that can be found on our website here. We used the Nuxt Strapi plugin and the Nuxt Internationalisation plugin. They were straightforward to use together, and internationalisation is such a big job to do, so we were grateful for the help of these great plugins 🎉 😊.

We kept the design the same for the most part, a few minor improvements here and there but nothing too significant. We are also still utilising Smoobu booking system API. Smoobu is a booking management system, and it keeps all of the big online marketplaces for holiday homes like Airbnb, booking.com etc., in sync.

We also moved away from Gridsome to Nuxt, so whilst we kept the design the same, this did not mean we could utilise the frontend. So we thought we might as well rebuild it whist doing everything else. It made sense to move to Nuxt because we are trying to streamline the tools and tech we use at Pixelhop. Nuxt has released a new version with Vue 3; hopefully, we will easily update to Vue 3, which we are keen to get all of our sites on where possible.

The performance has improved hugely; if you've read many (any 😂) of our blog posts, you'll know how passionate we are about building sites using the JAMStack for optimum performing websites. The original site was performant initially, but it soon needed more thought, love, and attention as there are many images. Now that Google has changed its search ranking algorithm, it has made it even more critical for clients to have performant websites because a slow site now directly affects your search ranking. We're secretly glad they altered their algorithm because it's something we've been passionate about for years.

Overall we are all delighted with the rebuild; originally, their site was built by Zef and in a bit of a rush to get something up, so we are thrilled to have something more futureproof that can grow with them. It was nice to utilise Strapi's new features as soon as it was on the shelf.

Thank you so much for reading and if you have any feedback or questions, feel free to get in touch 🙂