Looking back at 2023, we can look back on an incredibly productive year. We designed and realized many projects for our customers and also continued to develop our own platform TutKit.com very intensively. We would now like to give you an insight into a selection of our work from this year that is rich in content and visually varied.
Agency relaunch with headless CMS Strapi
One of our own highlights was the relaunch of our agency website. The previous version saw the light of day in 2016 and has lasted an unimaginable seven years for an agency. Even in the end, our old website was still able to compete with many other agency competitors in terms of modernity and design. It was based on WordPress. You can still view it online here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161002134225/http://4eck-media.de/
Here is a screenshot:
We have remained true to our minimalist style, which has been refined with small animations that support the user's interaction paths through our content. The areas of expertise have been reduced from eight to four and a new, visually appealing layout has also been designed for the references.
The new website also heralds a new direction in the way we design websites. Instead of WordPress, we now use the headless CMS Strapi with nuxt.js based on node.js for our own agency. This makes it more of an app than a website. The frontend and backend are actually completely separate from each other.
Another novelty is that we consistently use modern image formats. The images here on the agency site - as well as on TutKit.com - are output in browsers as AVIF image format. If a browser cannot display this, WebP is loaded as a fallback. AVIF is currently the most modern image format that requires the smallest file size with good image quality - and is therefore also a clear recommendation in Google's PageSpeed Insights. As of today, less than 1 percent of all websites use AVIF. We are one of them. For us, it is simply baffling why other agencies still use JPG or PNG for their clients. Even WebP is already 13 years old as a modern image format and is twice as resource-hungry compared to AVIF, which has a negative impact on performance. We have in fact taken a closer look at AVIF and have also published a blog post about it here:
Image format AVIF for websites boosts SEO, PageSpeed & User Experience
Another new feature on the agency side is bilingualism. Our content is now available in both German and English. For us, this is part of our own positioning, because we are also an international team that communicates with each other in English at a working level. On the other hand, it was also a nice exercise for our developers to set up the connection of our German content to the API of DeepL for translation. This is just a "normal" translation of the front-end content ... a fairly simple matter from a developer's point of view in preparation for some really challenging work we are currently working on: the multilingual roll-out of TutKit.com in up to 100 languages thanks to the connection to two translation AIs.
Two major store projects based on PrestaShop
As a completely new project, we designed and developed Wald-zu-Tisch.de, an online store for game meat for Lenz Wild GmbH. In addition to an individual, modern design and a user-centered user experience, we also took care of search engine optimization. The online store was directly nominated for this year's Shop Usability Award.
The biggest award for us is when a new project really learns to work. In this case, it means that the store also generates online visibility and ultimately significant sales. In any case, the trend is very positive and after just a few months, the impressions in the SERPs reached five-digit daily values.
At the same time, we are working on the relaunch of Fischkaufhaus.de from Müritzfischern this year. The aim was to bring the store into the current year in terms of design, experience and storytelling. Here, too, the aim was to put on a few more pounds for improved search engine optimization. The store went online after Easter.
Despite the less favorable economic environment, the online store is growing compared to the previous year. A relaunch is always dangerous. In our opinion, we have therefore done our job well. Müritzfischer has a modern online store that works and is even better received by customers than the old one. We are delighted with the result. Here is the whole story about the relaunch.
Several projects in the tourism, real estate and health sectors
With our new agency website, we have also sharpened our focus sectors in which we are particularly strong and experienced and where we primarily see our target customers: Health, real estate, e-commerce (online stores & booking portals).
One of the larger projects at the beginning of the year was the design of the WordPress MultiSite system with booking connection to DS for four tourism websites of K&K Ferienimmobilien GmbH & Co KG.
We were also able to develop the corporate identity and the new website for the new hotel brand Sea You. A great project all in all. There is also a separate blog post about this: Positioning the Sea You hotel brand
As an agency in a tourism region, we are always being used in this sector. We are currently working on the redesign of the website for the Seehotel Ecktannen here on the Müritz and have also been commissioned as SEO consultants for a major relaunch project for a vacation apartment platform.
Two more website projects from the real estate segment are waiting to go online. Firstly, we developed the website for the Pötenitzer Wiek vacation park and secondly the website for the Inselquartier Malchow. Only the pre-launch pages are currently online. The real websites will be launched with the start of marketing.
We are also currently working on two website projects in the medical sector, one of which will be a larger multi-site solution. So there is still a lot in the pipeline for 2024.
Various OnePagers: the best price-performance ratio for smaller projects
It doesn't always have to be a WordPress site that presents content on many subpages. For many companies, a one-pager that clearly presents the services and competencies as well as information about the company, values and career area is sufficient. For us, one-pagers are therefore often the best value-for-money websites for customers. A few more OnePagers went online this year, including for
- a bricklayer
- a solar project planning company
- a real estate developer
- a restaurant
- a yacht charter company
- a nursing service
The OnePager for the care company went online just last week.
It clearly shows why we believe that our OnePager, which is individually designed for each company, is the best choice for small companies with a clear range of services. The advantages of our landing page concept are
- modern and clear design with fine micro-animations
- everything clearly laid out on one page (just scroll, no need to click)
- sectional structure and visually and content-wise accurate fit
- the OnePager loads extremely quickly despite the video loop and other animations
- modern image format AVIF (with WebP as fallback) instead of outdated JPG/PNG
- individual icons and unique map material in the customer's corporate design, thus avoiding the use of images with third-party rights and also avoiding Google Maps (and cookies)
- Onepager is cookie-free and therefore without cookie annoyance banners
- SEO-optimized for (local) search terms relating to the customer's topic
- Secure and maintenance-free, as no CMS is used
Illustrative and design skills
If you ask us what makes our agency special, it's really the skillful balancing act of high design affinity and nerdy tech-booth. With our website solutions, we always work with the latest technical solutions and also realize perfectly formed designs that our design team conjures out of the digital hat. I would now like to present a small selection of works that have been created this year to give you a small showcase of our design and illustration skills:
Icon design: individually illustrated for customers
Logo design: with homage to local topography
Cartography: customized map designs for clients
Illustration / vectorization of family coats of arms
The creation of COATs could also be a great and exclusive idea for heart touching birthday wishes for special friends.
Digital paintings with regional motifs
3D visualizations for architecture
We have also had several projects in the field of 3D architectural visualizations, which cover the entire range of our 3D competencies - from floor plan visualizations and room concepts to exterior visualizations and urban planning renderings. Here are a few visual impressions:
Room concept for a restaurant in Waren (Müritz) adapted to the client's ideas:
Floor plan rendering for a new building project in Neubrandenburg:
Exterior visualization for the same new building project in Neubrandenburg:
Urban planning visualization for a new construction project on the coast
Aerial photographs of the entire construction area with over 40 buildings were actually the elementary service. But as the project is not yet in the marketing phase, only a street view can be shown here. We will be presenting the entire project in a separate blog post sometime in 2024:
Further development on TutKit.com
Exactly one year ago, we set ourselves 16 goals for our company. Most of them were aimed at the further development of TutKit.com. So this year we had a strong focus on new functions and improvements in our e-learning portal. And we were able to achieve a total of 13 goals. No mean feat, as we reformulated our goals in the middle of the year. But more on that in a moment.
What did we achieve?
The most important goal was to create the option of purchasing our products and individual content without a subscription in addition to the flat rate. We have now integrated the store function into TutKit.com for packages and individual content. Another goal was to introduce a voucher and discount system, which was implemented in the fall.
We also optimized the user interface, improved the display in the tutorials, enlarged the fonts and optimized the contrasts for better readability, expanded the blog, streamlined the categories and much more.
We reported on most of the updates and further developments in a separate blog post here:
https://www.tutkit.com/de/blog/133-design-ux-technik-performance-wenn-dein-portal-noch-besser-wird
With the further development, we have also updated the tools, frameworks, libraries etc. used to the latest versions, carried out a security sprint and completed a second major SEO sprint. The SEO sprint to improve on-page quality was accompanied by a PageSpeed sprint in which we converted over 50,000 images into the modern AVIF image format.
The result is a super-fast portal. Google loves fast websites. And the SEO sprint with the improvements in PageSpeed were also rewarded directly by Google with a substantial increase in visibility. Shortly before Christmas, we achieved six-digit daily impressions in the SERPs and four-digit daily clicks. A great SEO success for us.
New products designed, produced, licensed and/or published
A portal like TutKit.com does not only thrive on functional and technical development, but above all on the content with high utility value that we produce and publish for our customers and members.
This year, we were able to design, produce and publish 78 new products. Some video training courses were licensed from trainers who have also published their online courses elsewhere, while many were also created by us. One focus was on video training courses about AI. We have integrated a new tutorial category for this purpose with 18 online courses on ChatGPT, Midjourney and Co.
We also focused on our corporate design packages, which we have now prepared more thematically. We also published new packages with templates for applications, flyers, Photoshop campaigns, icon sets and much, much more - everything the creative heart desires.
In addition to these new releases, we also published dozens of new help articles on using software and 62 editorial blog posts in 2023.
In summary: we were really busy this year!
Artificial intelligence (AI): the big topic of the year
Just before Christmas, I always write my team a review of the year, together with goals for the coming year. I also ask my team specific questions about personal and professional milestones that we want to achieve. It was interesting that a year ago, with one exception, no one in our team had AI on their radar. We formulated our goals. AI was left out of our expectations.
Then came the Christmas shock for me: I really got to grips with ChatGPT and Midjourney for the first time and immediately recognized the disruptive (destructive) power of this new technology. Yes, the shock even spoiled my Christmas spirit a little last year. My brother and co-managing director Stefan and I discussed how we wanted to respond to this development. AI is coming anyway. So we are specifically looking for everything where AI can support us in our processes. AI will turn many companies into losers. Our focus: we want to be among the winners.
Stefan has been working intensively with all AI tools to check what we should incorporate into our processes in order to stay on the ball and also take advantage of the positive aspects of AI. This has resulted in many great video trainings on AI tools from him, so that we can also share our experiences directly with our customers. We will continue to incorporate new AI techniques into our processes. The quality of our templates and products is getting better and better with AI. We are now equipping covers with AI images that are simply inspiring and great. And we have started to replace the placeholder images in the templates with real images created with AI tools. The quality of our products is getting better and better and easier for users to use. The sound quality of video trainings is also improving as we are also using AI for sound enhancement to de-sound videos with 1-click solutions, remove noise, etc.
Development work is becoming a form of pair programming as our developers use ChatGPT and other AI tools to respond faster and more effectively to development challenges.
Since July, we've been working on the biggest milestone in our TutKit story: making the platform multilingual. It makes perfect sense, because ⅔ of our products - our templates and assets - have always been of great interest to creatives abroad. And with the progress of AI tools, the German video trainings will soon also be transcribable and synchronizable in different languages.
While the agency website on which you are reading this article is a relatively simple technical solution, TutKit.com is a self-developed platform based on Laravel and vue.js and is a highly complex system with user management, content management, newsletter management, a flat rate and the option to buy products individually.
All components are to be fully translated. This includes, among other things:
- Hard-coded text components > Incorporation of variables throughout the code
- Dictionary/glossary to translate specific words as required
- Hundreds of parameters that interact with each other (e.g. linking products to categories)
- Separate components that are to be translated from components that continue to apply globally for all languages
- User management (users receive a language setting, for example)
- PDF invoices and emails in the user's language
- Comprehensive options for administrators: global translation of all pages into a new language AND translate individual pages AND translate individual parts of pages
- Image metadata > each image receives translated metadata, which is then displayed depending on the selected language
- Automatic setting of correct links (i.e. after translation, links to German pages are automatically linked to pages in the corresponding language)
- Further components, among others: Notifications, e-mails, vouchers, quizzes etc.
The translation will take place via the connection to the APIs of translation AIs. And this shows the enormous benefit that AI can have for companies like ours when we pass over 50 million characters on over 1,800 subpages to an AI and receive the context-correct translation back. It's already working on our dev environment! It's like magic.
To give you an idea of the effort involved in such a sprint: as of now, over 600 tasks have been created and processed in our project management tool JIRA for the development of multilingualism. Many more will follow. Five developers have currently been working non-stop on this sprint for months. When we were just starting out, we were looking for documentation or other information on how to approach a project like this. What can we say: there is no roadmap on the Internet. So we designed everything ourselves to the best of our knowledge and belief and broke down this mammoth task into small chunks to make it feasible for a team like ours.
With TutKit.com, we have already created an LMS (learning management system) with subscription and e-commerce functions that is rarely found on the market in this form. If we add multilingualism to this, we crown our in-house development as something truly unique.
Our plan is to roll out our portal in English, Russian, Ukrainian and Turkish in January. Then it's time for testing and bug fixing. Once all the bugs and inconsistencies have been fixed, we will add around five more languages to the system every week until our portal is running in 100 languages. And that means 1,800 subpages per language. We will therefore multiply our number of pages into six figures. In preparation for this, we have put a lot of effort into the SEO sprint and the PageSpeed sprint. Because we want to launch our multilingualism with one of the most optimized and modern portals available on the Internet. When we submit the pages to Google via sitemap.xml, we also want to stand a chance against the top dogs in our home markets in other languages.
We are really excited to see what will happen when the first languages go online. I'll report back here in a year at the latest.