TheFactory — positioning itself as Africa's premier tech ecosystem — had no professional web presence. A company selling credibility to startups and investors was invisible online. No site meant no trust, no discoverability, no inbound pipeline.
TheFactory's value proposition — credibility and discoverability — lived entirely offline. The original design brief called for rich animations and heavy media that looked impressive in Figma. The problem was that the business needed to rank on Google and load fast on mid-range African mobile networks. A beautiful site that doesn't index or takes 5 seconds to load defeats the entire purpose.
Stakeholder alignment on architecture, hosting, and design direction arrived late, which compressed the real build window significantly.
I pushed back on the original design — heavy animations, large hero media — and replaced them with lightweight transitions and optimized assets. The visual impact took a small hit, but load time and SEO crawlability were the actual business goals. A site that ranks and loads wins over a site that impresses in a demo.
Visibility and trust > visual flair.
I'd push for Next.js from the start. SEO and visibility were the whole point of the project, and React doesn't offer server-side rendering out of the box. We ended up patching around it with extra packages. Next.js would have given us SSR, better SEO primitives, and image optimization for free — no workarounds needed.