Making our Markdown-inspired website

I’ve worked in tech spanning three decades. Things change fast; they always have. But right now feels different. I can’t predict what will happen beyond just a few months out. Technologies like MCP drop and get industry-wide adoption weeks later. With AI, we’re in the midst of a huge shift, like those for Web 2.0 and apps. Maybe bigger.

It’s a time of creativity and exploration, figuring out both what we can do and what people need.

For the teams who don’t just want to keep up, but win, shipping velocity will be key. The vanguard of companies that are leading the way are shipping fast with lean, action-oriented teams.

We’re building Bucket for this new era, enabling developers to ship the right features faster.

That means feature flagging that’s frictionless, purpose-built, and customer-centric. It’s why ‘Flags to go fast’ isn’t just some headline on our website for us, it’s codified into how we build, and is reflected in what we’re building, too.

In just the last 3 months, we’ve shipped Bucket MCP, so you can flag features directly from your code editor. Bucketbot for GitHub that automatically cleans up flags once features have been rolled out. And a bunch of other DX features like type safety, all designed to keep you shipping. They build on top of core features like feedback, which effortlessly brings customer requests and issues into your workflow so you can fix them faster.

Of course, shipping velocity has always been important, but it can get forgotten when times are slow. That’s why most feature flagging vendor homepages are filled with claims of ‘de-risking’ and ‘guarded releases.’ Now, no one wants to break things to move fast, but your feature flagging service shouldn’t slow you down, either. So when we came to redesign our site, we wanted the design and messaging to reflect our focus on speed.

The inspiration was Markdown. Developers often remark that they skip SaaS landing pages and head straight to the docs to understand what a product can really do. After all, it’s easy to scan, consistent, and doesn't support fluff. That’s exactly what we wanted for our website. We put together some values - a bunch of thoughts capturing how we wanted to approach it, and stuck them at the top of the page in Figma. Every design and messaging choice was guided by those values.

Of course, such values are fine in theory, but the reality is always trickier. In breaking from the norm, we’re asking visitors to do more. They’ll need to figure out a different layout as well as grok what our product can do for them. Most SaaS landing pages follow an informal structure: Hero message with CTA at the top, followed by 3 boxes calling out key benefits (not features!) below. Want to see pricing? There’ll be a link in the top nav. Documentation? Head to the footer. For a visitor, that predictability means there’s less cognitive overhead. For vendors, it means higher conversion rates.

But we’re not chasing that. We’re trying to create something developers love, even if that means it’s not for everyone. What we ended up with certainly wouldn’t be the winning variant in any A/B test.

Here’s what we did:

We started with the headlines, all left-aligned. Each one explains what the product can do straightforwardly. “Speak normal,” as the values say. 

Then we added UI screenshots and videos. We wanted the focus to be on the product - show, don't tell.

To make every part of the product more tangible, we added inline links to closely connect the site with our documentation. If you’re curious to learn more, then you can read about it in the docs, not on more marketing pages.

Another reference to documentation is the vertical menu bars. They're quick to scan and with the right sub-headings, they function like a table of contents so you can learn about the product’s functionality from the menu alone. Also, just like footnotes in documents, we added a gutter on the right to add a little more context about a feature where needed.

Lastly, each subpage (like Flags and Feedback) explains how to use the feature, so we laid them out in a chronological order with numbered steps. So after scanning it, you don’t just know what we offer, but how you can use it, too.

That’s it! As I say, the theory is one thing; let us know what it’s like in reality. Check out our new website ✨