I'm the co-founder of Whitespace, which is a Swedish, remote-first digital agency. When we're not building things for our clients, we're busy contributing to various open source projects. Our greatest hit to date is the HTML Preview Addon for Storybook. We're unreasonably proud of the fact that it has been downloaded +100K times. (That's a lot, by Swedish standards.)
For more than a year, we have been working on our new agency website. It's a sophisticated Jamstack setup with a Gatsby frontend. If this site were a vehicle, it would be a rocket ship. And since November, this rocket ship has been almost ready for launch.
The only problem is that we cannot finish the last few things that would make it ready for launch. We're fully booked with client projects. Prioritizing our own website is a tough call for me, my co-founder Johan and our Head of Design Peter. To make matters worse, the website is so complex that running it post launch would require a small team of engineers. Not web devs, but actual engineers. I've finally realized that this website may remain in the "almost ready for launch" state for good.
Two weeks ago I decided to simply scrap this website.
We need a fresh start, and this time we want to keep it simple. For that reason (and many others), we've decided to use Eleventy.
Now, if you're an Eleventy specialist, we need your help.
To begin with, we want to find a good way to integrate forms with our Eleventy site. On our current WordPress website, we use Ninja Forms. We need a form engine that has the same level of configurability – but integrated in the Eleventy website.
A typical use case is that I create a form and then connect it with Zapier (or n8n.io) so that I can send form data to our webinar tool.
These are the high level tasks that I (the marketing guy) have identified:
For more than a year, we have been working on our new agency website. It's a sophisticated Jamstack setup with a Gatsby frontend. If this site were a vehicle, it would be a rocket ship. And since November, this rocket ship has been almost ready for launch.
The only problem is that we cannot finish the last few things that would make it ready for launch. We're fully booked with client projects. Prioritizing our own website is a tough call for me, my co-founder Johan and our Head of Design Peter. To make matters worse, the website is so complex that running it post launch would require a small team of engineers. Not web devs, but actual engineers. I've finally realized that this website may remain in the "almost ready for launch" state for good.
Two weeks ago I decided to simply scrap this website.
We need a fresh start, and this time we want to keep it simple. For that reason (and many others), we've decided to use Eleventy.
Now, if you're an Eleventy specialist, we need your help.
To begin with, we want to find a good way to integrate forms with our Eleventy site. On our current WordPress website, we use Ninja Forms. We need a form engine that has the same level of configurability – but integrated in the Eleventy website.
A typical use case is that I create a form and then connect it with Zapier (or n8n.io) so that I can send form data to our webinar tool.
These are the high level tasks that I (the marketing guy) have identified:
- Decide what form engine to use. We need something that we can run on our own infrastructure in Sweden, for legal reasons. European privacy laws (also known as General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR) are quite strict. Essentially they prohibit the use of a forms SaaS provider that is headquartered in the US – or run on US owned infrastructure like AWS. One option could be to use a WordPress instance simply for the forms.
- Outline how the integration should be done. You would run this by our Tech Lead Fredrik to simply get his approval on the proposal. Fredrik, by the way, is the guy who built that Storybook Addon that we’re so proud of.
- Develop or customize the integration.
Is this something that you could help us with?
Your primary contact person at Whitespace would be our Head of Design Peter Antonius (@okkido). He's a UX-designer and frontend developer and accessibility specialist. And that’s only a few of his many talents.
I hope that our collaboration on the forms integration progresses nicely. In that case, we will likely need your help with additional development work on the website. You'd be working together with Peter.
If you want to help me, please send an e-mail to blomberg@hey.com.
Take care.