Migrating the Neokaal Website to Astro and Tailwind

One of the nice things about being a startup is that you can experiment. When I first built our corporate website, it used Next.js. That turned out to be far more complex than this use case needed, so we stripped things back and moved to a simple static site: HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, Jinja templates, and a small Python build script. That worked well for a while, but as we added more content, the site became slower to evolve.

After considering a few alternatives, and with our earlier Next.js experience in mind, we decided to migrate to Astro for the static-site structure and Tailwind for a cleaner, more custom visual system while preserving the existing URLs. We also had one important constraint: we did not want to change the Hexpel, our flagship game, page. It is designed by hand to match the look and feel of the game, and it uses the same design language. Happily, the migration went smoothly, and the site now feels more polished while sitting on newer, better-supported tooling.

Most of these changes will go unnoticed by visitors, which is probably a good thing. For us, the important benefit is that publishing new posts should be faster, the visual system is easier to refine, and the foundation should be simpler to maintain.