Knack is Flanders’ biggest current affairs magazine. It remains one of the most widely read magazines in its class, but like any magazine, it needs to adapt to the digitalisation of media. The client asked our cloud-based website to develop a fast and high-quality discount code platform.
Studio Pixili was expected to deliver a website with top-notch design that fits within the Knack and Le Vif brands, as well as Cloud-based techniques that provide the necessary performance, security and scalability of the level of Belgium’s best websites.
The Challenge
Our level of expertise and experience is high. Of all our projects, there is no better example than this one. Roularta, the publisher of Knack and Le Vif, has more than a thousand employees, including its own team of software developers. Yet they chose us for the technical and visual side, and Expert Group for their +10 years of experience running the most popular discount code sites in Belgium. This is not our first project with discount codes. We have years of experience developing similar sites such as TagCity;
A unique project of which we developed three versions in almost six years. So we both experience being rare, and Roularta saw this.
Built for success
Simple, elegant design with a focus on graphic design that fits within the Knack brand.
We also give it our own twist, e.g.; the set of icons are of our own design and somewhere on the site a Pixipop is subtly hidden.
Elements of the user interface that we know work well because of our years of experience with TagCity. Beyond that, technically high-flying.
Super-fast search function that returns results instantly. The images below are not accelerated, and are real shots of the search function isolated (where single element is shown) on the website.
With a Google Lighthouse score of +90 for each page and 100 for most.
An average page load time of 300 milliseconds. This is how a page turn feels instantaneous.
A successful website is a double-edged sword. Knack.kortingscodes.be’s sister site, TagCity, almost became a plague because of this success. How success can become a problem is very technical, so we will explain it with an example.
You can compare how most websites work with a room. Usually a small room, there is room for 10-20 visitors at a time. Upon success, the room suddenly attracts not 10, but 100, 200 or even 1,000 visitors at a time. 1,000 visitors won’t fit in a room of 10, so you don’t have to be a scientist to know that that will cause problems and the room will have to be completely closed.
To take this back to the website, closing often means total inaccessibility. The alternative is to rent a larger room, which gets more expensive the more visitors there are. However, the room can be so expensive that traffic takes a huge bite out of the website’s profits. As a result, it can be loss-making.
This is often called website scalability. Our approach is extremely scalable. Our website is not in a room but in a giant field; there is room for 10 as well as 1,000 visitors at a time. The field is not a building and is therefore much cheaper to run, but there is less luxury. Still, as at the better festival, we have found many ways to make that field feel like a hall.
How is this possible?
We know we make big claims, but we have a website that runs at top speed, huge visitor numbers and low hosting costs. There is no catch; the result is a fully customised system that is up to date and latest cloud-based website technology.
