Mini case study

Sphero

2016 Marketing site

Not many startups get to have their product play a main role in the biggest movie franchise in World history. But that’s what happened for Sphero when they came up with BB8, the cool Star Wars droid.

That meant that when Sphero.com was being created, being able to handle huge traffic spikes serving terabytes a day in peak moments being able to smoothly cater a vast amount of users was the single most important thing.

It’s our choice for Netlify’s very first Site of the Week because it takes great advantage of being served from our custom built CDNs, and first and foremost because droids are awesome!

Check out below for the short chat we had with Sphero on their site and use of Netlify.

Featuring

Mathew De Goes

Mathew De Goes

Lead developer, Sphero

What is it?

Sphero.com is a data and user experience driven brand site which aims to delight, surprise and inform our customer base. We strive to make the site a balance of data driven user interactions, innovation of layout and design as well as a heavy dose of eye candy. Each page, section and user interaction is an symphony which combines market/competition research, ui/ux research and lovely crafted graphics from our design team. It’s only through such a carefully crafted experience that we can share our love of robots and connected play.

Why Netlify?

Simply put, Netlify lets us focus our energy on creating the brand site that our customers deserve, and that we need to grow our business. It solves so many both simple and complex problems, including scalable hosting, page pre-rendering, cache control, staging sites and so much more. When we selected Netlify it was not only the best solution for our needs, but also both reasonably priced and easy to implement. Plus your online documentation is a life saver.

Favorite Feature?

It’s hard to pick one thing, but I’d say the diversity of the platform. We actually use a Netlify to run a number of other services beyond our Brand site, and the ease of setup and high degree of performance has served us well.

Netlify Features used

  • Rollbacks
  • Continuous Delivery
  • Branch Deploys
  • Deploy Contexts
  • Asset Post Processing
  • Domain Aliases
  • Prerendering
  • Password Protection
  • Custom HTTP Headers
  • Redirect Rules
  • Rewrite Rules
  • Proxy Rules
  • Outbound Webhooks
  • Outbound Integrations
  • Git Integration
  • Cached Dependencies
  • Drag & Drop Deploy
  • Web UI
  • Deploy previews
  • HTTPS

Tools & Frameworks used

  • Angular
  • Jekyll
  • GRUNT
  • Contentful API
  • Vero API
  • SASS