The new website is live!
Over the past month and a half, I’ve been working feverishly on redesigning and rebuilding the Mochi website from scratch — including a complete rewrite of the documentation. I’m very happy to finally announce that the new site is live!
What started as “a small cleanup and redesign” quickly turned into a full rebuild, but the end result is a faster site, clearer documentation, and a much smoother experience, especially for new users.
The old website
The previous website was a patchwork of different tools and scripts. The blog ran on Ghost (1.0), the documentation lived in MkDocs, and the rest of the site was held together with a collection of custom scripts and Mustache templates.
While this setup worked, it became increasingly difficult to maintain and extend over time. Additionally, the design, while focusing on clearly showing off Mochi's features, felt increasingly dated and uninspiring.
The new architecture
For the relaunch, everything has been consolidated into MkDocs, a Python-based static site generator. Although MkDocs is primarily known as a documentation tool, it has grown into a very capable general-purpose static site generator, especially when combined with the rich ecosystem of available plugins.
One of the trickier parts of this migration was finding a good blogging solution. The excellent Material for MkDocs theme includes a powerful blogging plugin, but it’s tightly coupled to the rest of the framework. Extracting just the blogging functionality was a bit daunting at first, but in the end it only took about half a day of work. I may publish the extracted version on GitHub in the future.
For hosting, the site now runs on DigitalOcean’s App Platform, which offers free hosting for static sites (up to three) and includes an edge CDN out of the box. The new hosting setup is not only cheaper, but faster to boot!
An interactive homepage
One small but fun detail in the new design is the homepage hero itself. What looks like a static screenshot of the app is actually the real Mochi application embedded directly into the page.
The app is loaded in an iframe, which means visitors can scroll around, click, and explore Mochi right from the homepage, without signing up or leaving the site. It’s a low-friction way to get a feel for how Mochi works before committing to anything.
Updated documentation
A significant portion of the work (easily half of the total effort) went into rewriting the documentation. The new docs are more comprehensive, easier to navigate, and include step-by-step guides and screenshots to help you get up and running quickly.
If you’re new to Mochi, the Getting Started guide is a great place to begin.
Looking ahead
This redesign lays the groundwork for future improvements. The forums will be updated next to better integrate with the new layout, and the deck-sharing portal will eventually live seamlessly alongside the rest of the site.
I’m also planning to publish more articles covering specific use cases, workflows, and practical how-to guides for getting the most out of Mochi.
If you haven’t checked out the new site yet, I’d love for you to take a look — and as always, feedback is very welcome.
