We Deleted 22 Components to Make Our Site Better

Our old site looked like a hackathon demo. Dark background, glowing text, a 3D hero scene rendered in WebGL, a cursor that left a neon trail, a fake terminal that typed out marketing copy. It was technically impressive and practically useless.

We rebuilt it this week. The new version is off-white, single accent color, flat layout, Inter. Took one day. The most important part was not what we added, it was what we deleted.

What we cut

22 components went in the trash: HeroScene, NeonBackground, Scene3D, CursorGlow, GradientBlob, FloatingElements, GlitchCarousel, Terminal, GradientMesh, HeroVideo, MagicianMonologue, ParallaxInterstitial, and several more.

Every one of them existed to signal technical capability rather than demonstrate it. A 3D background running on the GPU does not tell a small business owner we can build them an ordering system. It tells them we like impressive things.

The real work was hiding behind all of it.

What we replaced it with

Two portals we actually built and shipped:

Freedom Ag Supply is a multi-tenant AI platform for an agricultural supplier. Product catalog, online ordering, and an AI weed-identification assistant that pulls sourced recommendations in seconds. Running on AWS, live in production.

Homefront Family Services is a client-management portal for a family-services organization. Case tracking, client records, AI-assisted workflows. The team saves hours of manual admin every week because of it.

These are real systems serving hundreds of users across the country, every day. That's a better case for our capabilities than any animated grid.

The hero section now has a card showing "Freedom Ag & Homefront, Environment: Production, 24/7." A ticker below it cycles through real project statuses: Freedom Ag live in production, Homefront live in production, Command Post serving SWAT teams nationwide. No invented numbers, no projected results. Just what's actually running.

The design system

Color: #F7F7F5 background, #0B5CAB accent, #111111 text. One font: Inter. Borders are 1px, rgba(17,17,17,0.08). Cards lift on hover with a border color shift and a soft shadow. That's the entire system.

The capabilities section became an asymmetric bento grid instead of six identical cards in a row. Different cell sizes, same content. Breaks the visual monotony that identical grids always create.

Icons went from filled and decorative to thin stroke at 1.5 weight, closer to how the interfaces we actually build look.

Why we did this

The agency sites we respected most didn't try to prove anything with their design. They showed the work, stated the outcome, and got out of the way.

The dark glowing aesthetic reads as "look at what we can do." A clean light-mode layout with real case stats reads as "here is what we did." Those are different conversations, and the second one closes faster.

We're not building demos. We're building platforms businesses run on. The site should say that plainly, and now it does.