Why we built Aamsel's new website with super fast Astro

When it comes to software development you always have to choose a technology stack and the most important part is, you have to stick with it. It’s not easy to change the technology later without a significant amount of work. That’s why the decision is so important in the long run.

There are different factors you have to think about while deciding on a technology stack. We won’t elaborate on which factors are the most important but we will tell you how we made this decision.

First of all, Aamsel is self-funded. We need to use the resources we have and keep things simple to avoid unnecessary complications (thinking long term as well). We don’t have a web frontend background. Yes, we have an Aamsel web app but this is done with Flutter, which has nothing to do with classic web development.

We want to keep it simple and we want to have a really fast website! Astro is all about server-side rendering. That means that there is (almost) no dynamic content on your website, just prerendered content. For the non-technical reader here it means that the website is built on our machine and then it’s uploaded, similar to a book that was published. Doesn’t sound that fascinating? Modern websites mostly have dynamic content. They show images from another server, and they react to your cookies, for example, they show you the products you like and not what another person likes. This also is cool and has its advantages, but it makes the website slower and more complicated. We don’t need dynamic content on our website as all our business logic will be in our Aamsel App and the website only shows static information.

Astro enables you to use your favorite website technology stack of your choice (e.g. Vuejs or React) and builds a static website out of it. The learning curve of Astro is very high very fast. It also has out-of-the-box markdown support which we like and its community is really big. It suits our needs and we can build it ourselves even though our expertise relays on mobile app development.