Say Hello to The Brand-New Labiotech.eu, Our Biggest Product Redesign Since We Launched 💥

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You might have noticed that something changed on our site today.

Indeed, we’re very proud to launch our brand-new website, which we started from scratch on a blank piece of paper. We are further improving your user experience and the page performance, and we’ll have the possibility of adding more crazy features in the coming months.  

This took a lot of hard work, especially from our developer, Ciaran, who did a fantastic job.

We had this project in mind since our first fundraising in early 2016 (https://www.labiotech.eu/inside-labiotech/how-raised-first-seed-round-build-next-techcrunch-biotech/) and continuously brainstormed on it, collected your precious feedback, and selected what would be the most important elements to change.

The three major goals of the new site are:

  1. To improve your user experience with a refreshed homepage, better navigation inside the menus, and a better post template to improve your reading comfort
  2. To improve the overall performance three-fold by reducing the number of lines of code and keep only what we need
  3. To have a technology platform we can continue to expand upon until we conquer the biotech universe

In short, you should love the new website, and if you don’t want to know the details, you can stop reading now, enjoy the new site, and send us feedback here. Whether your feedback is positive or not, the important thing is that it’s honest. 😉

For those who are more curious, here’s a quick look into the sweat and complexity behind developing such a large revamp.

We launched the first version of Labiotech.eu in September 2014 (https://www.labiotech.eu/inside-labiotech/public-launch-labiotech-eu-betahaus-berlin/), and wow, this gives me goosebumps to see now. 😇 To save time and resources (which we didn’t have at the time), we modified a custom WordPress theme so we could focus on creating amazing content and growing our audience.

Over time, we improved this theme to better fit our needs, but we got closer and closer to maxing out its limits.

We knew at some point we would have to start from scratch and invest a lot of resources to get to the next level, which we planned for 2018.

We started the development of the new site right after the summer holidays.

The first step was to define the existing or new features we wanted to develop. Even if our website looks simple, it’s always more complex than it seems under the hood, and it’s easy to lose focus on the most important features.

Once every team gave input and we defined a set list of features and functionality, we started drafting mockups.

Lots of mock-ups

We worked on 25 versions of the mockups until we had exactly what we wanted. We took these mockups through several rounds of team feedback to get all the best ideas possible. The mockup phase lasted two months instead of one, as we could still improve them early on to save us time later—it’s always easier to change a mockup than a coded website.

Then came the biggest amount of work: the actual coding of the site. We finished by end of January as planned, let the team play with it, and prepared a beta version, which we sent to 200 of our most active users to collect feedback from fresh eyes outside of our team. Thanks to the dozens who filled it out—your feedback was very helpful. 👍

And here we go today, launching it for you and our 150,000+ monthly readers.

We’re all super excited and hope you will love the new website as much as we do. It would be lovely if you could take 1 minute to answer this 3-question form to help us improve it even further -> LINK typeform

Thanks a lot for being such a great part of our community and watch out for the new features coming soon. 😉

Philip and the Labiotech team

P.S. Like what you see? If so, you would make my day if you take 10 seconds to share our new website with the 3 most relevant people that come to your mind—that would be lovely!

 

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