For the longest time ERPNext website revamp was considered a pending ambitious project. The older website had been around for more than four years, evolved over the years by multiple contributors.

Past debt

ERPNext’s old website was cryptic and confusing. There was confusion about the brand as well as our pricing. “Are you ERPNext or Frappe?”, “Your pricing is different on erpnext.com from frappecloud.com”, complained some of our customers on support and sales channels. Any time we heard this, we cringed about the fact that the ERPNext website was far behind and hadn't caught up with our evolving business model.

Last year (early 2024), we finally started working on the website project. First, we rebuilt frappe.io, which was quickly followed by new products like CRM, Helpdesk, Learning, and then we built Frappe Cloud, FrappeHR and Frappe Framework. Most of these projects had a primary visionary—who was either the product engineer or marketer.

ERPNext—the most important of all—was decided to get done last. This helped us evolve the design lanuage on other websites and get ready for ERPNext. Also can't deny the fact that ERPNext engineers love solving hard problems (like fixing bugs, improving performance and scalability) more than product marketing, and many engineers including Nabin believe that happy customers are the best marketing. Although there is some merit to that argument, it is not fully true. Having a decent website is important to educate customers and build trust. As the saying goes, “First impression is the last impression”. And we weren’t setting the right first impression.

Nishant Vora, who leads design at Frappe, has been at the center of driving all the website revamps. He felt a sense of ownership to complete the full circle and picked up the massive project in mid-Oct. As I was working on ERPNext product marketing, I was equally invested in making a great website at the beginning, but with recent changes in my role my attention was invested in other areas too.

Discovering the iceberg

We decided to migrate erpnext.com to frappe.io/erpnext, with a vision to bring all products under one umbrella. We hired an SEO Agency (Spacemen) who can help with the migration in a way that minimizes impact on traffic and signups.

Website-driven development

When we started working on the new copies and product screens, it was decided that the images will be taken with ERPNext version 16 (which is yet to be launched and not stable). As v16 was not stable, some screens had UI/UX issues and to save time Nishant tried to fix them by editing directly on Figma. I have seen many product companies oversell by showcasing their product as much better than reality. Compared to those companies, Nishant’s actions were innocent and harmless. Yet Rushabh held a high bar, and asked the engineering team to fix all the issues before we added them to the website. That’s when Dipen and Nishant started raising all the issues on GitHub and Ejaaz, Diptanil and Soham started fixing them one by one.

Writing well researched copies

Writing good website copies is hard. More so for ERPNext because it has evolved into a beast, with so many features applicable in so many industries. Writing good copies requires deep product and industry knowledge. It requires rigorous research of customers and competitors' products too. Thanks to Umair and his years of experience and knowledge, we wrote some good copies for the module pages. Given more time, we could have put in a lot more effort. In the meantime, we decided to take some help from people in the community, including Ganga, Krishank and Manan, to complement our efforts.

Not everything can be automated

Not all work is creative, and definitely not one which involves copy pasting content from ~100 pages from older websites to the new one. But someone had to do it as this could not be automated due to certain limitations. Pratiksha, who is also part of the design team, took this up. Thanks to her, we traversed the long tail of scope towards the finish line faster than we thought. Not only this, Pratiksha also helped with some interesting flow charts that explains our products really well.

The gap vs. gain

Pursuit of speed and quality is a balancing act. Most lasting improvements happen over a period of time. So we decided to launch. Although the current website is a good start, we believe it is far from our best. We will plan to improve it iteratively. But instead of focusing on what's not perfect, it is worth remembering so many amazing things we achieved in the last few months.

Suraj improved the Frappe Builder by introducing important features like applying component change to all pages, ease of adding redirects, ability to add JSON schema to each page and many more.

Thanks to this project, the upcoming ERPNext Version 16 is more stable.

We cleaned up and fixed so many broken pages, 404s and sub-par quality pages from the past.

We added better urls, titles, descriptions, and learnt something new about SEO and how google indexing works.

Along with the website we also made a ERPNext demo live (for anyone to explore our features without login), something that had been pending for a long time.

The new website is far better than our older website. All our brands now fall under the same umbrella of the Frappe brand.

So yes, we could do better. But that does not discount the progress we've made from where we started.

"If you measure your current-self against your previous-self, you’ll experience happiness, satisfaction and confidence"

— Dr. Benjamin Hardy, co-author of The gap and the gain.

Frappe's organic traffic grows steadily

Today, all our websites put together garner lacs of visitors every month. We don't spend any dollars on marketing and this traction is 100% organic. As a matter of fact, most visitors who land on our website search for "ERPNext" which is a testament to the word-of-mouth from existing customers. Apart from organic searches, the next thing that helps discovery is open-source. We're probably the only company leading the wave of building open source business software. With this move from erpnext.com to frappe.io/erpnext, we hope to reinforce the Frappe brand, increase visibility of our new products and ensure people know the story behind the amazing work we do.

Nishant, the patient dark horse

Nishant has been the front runner for all the websites. Given more time he would be the one writing this blog especially because of the efforts he has invested not only in the past 5 months, but also during the last whole year for all the websites. Kudos to his patience, persistence and rigour. And thanks to all the contributors including Umair, Pratiksha, Dipen, Suraj, Michelle, Dharmesh, Rohit, Ejaaz, Soham, Ganga, Krishank, Abhilash, Jishnu, without whom we could not have achieved this milestone.🚀