About Andrilla
Fortune 500 websites for small to mid-sized businesses and non-profits.
Christian FrancisFounder/CEO
Christian Francis was born and raised in Midlothian, Virginia, still calling it home today. With his wife Julia, he has a dog and a child on the way.
He's always been passionate about creative outlets such as graphic design, filmmaking, and photography, often using his skills to document his love for the outdoors.
He loves skiing, backpacking, running, and playing his ukulele, but his favorite things to do are the things he gets to do with his wife.
In all that he does, he seeks to glorify God. This is why Andrilla was built, with integrity, hard work, and kindness.
Our History
Why Andrilla was Founded
In 2019, our founder, Christian Francis, saw an issue in the web design and development for businesses world. Designers would create a good starting point, but leave it up to their non-designer clients to make updates, leading to poorly designed pages. Likewise, developers would create a good website, but after they finished, it would be challenging to make updates without shelling out another few hundred to the developer. On top of that, most designers and developers don't do SEO, and those that do, only do the bare minimum or don't understand what makes SEO good.
This is why we prioritize customer care like no one else, giving the hand-holding each client needs to get them where they want to go.
When COVID hit in 2020, many businesses, whose primary marketing was in-person, were left without a good way to reach more prospective clients. This is when Christian founded Andrilla—to guide these small to mid-sized businesses and non-profits in building a solid online presence.
How Andrilla got to Where it is
Although Andrilla was founded as a web design company, it quickly evolved into a web development company, due to website design platforms not offering the flexibility in design or backend features that our clients needed—not to mention, you just have to hope the website design platform you're using optimizes everything for you, or your website will be slow and not user-friendly for disabled people.
In 2021,
Andrilla launched the Andrilla Dashboard, allowing clients to seamlessly view form responses and manage some small site data.
Early in 2022,
Andrilla added a content management system (CMS) as a feature add-on, for companies that need more control and have frequent updates to their sites.
2023 brought new challenges for our clients,
some needing robust user authentication systems with event sign-ups and payment processing. Now, with our user authentication add-on, it's easier than ever for companies to add and manage their own users on their websites.
In late 2024,
the Andrilla Dashboard got a major overhaul, allowing for faster development of features and more connections to individual client websites.
How Andrilla Continues to be Different
We understand that most small to mid-sized businesses get most of their clients from referrals. That's why our approach to the website, isn't just about the website. We teach our clients to understand how to take advantage of LinkedIn, Google Business, and print materials to become more visible in every facet.
Nowadays, the web development industry is massive, and the features available to developers is rapidly expanding. We are always staying on top of these features to make sure our clients never fall behind.
Some of the Features We Take Advantage of:
Light and Dark Modes(as long as it still fits the brand)
Didn't realize that? Try switching your device to darklight mode.
Semantic HTML
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the language used to display content on a website. Understanding the semantics of HTML is extremely important. When used incorrectly, it makes it difficult for screen readers and bots to understand, bringing your search score down. The better Google understands your website, the more likely it is to recommend it.
New
<dialog>ElementThis is part of semantic HTML and it's what powers our popup modals. The new way of using this element allows for better usability by people using keyboard navigation and screen readers.
Progressive Image Enhancement
This is when the browser first loads up a low quality, blurry version of a photo, and as connection allows, loads higher quality versions. This allows our sites to load crazy fast. We also compress and convert all of our photos to WEBP, the new image standard for the web.
Progressive Video EnhancementPowered by
Just like the progressive image enhancement, we use Vimeo to do the same thing with your videos.
Keyboard Navigation and ARIA
Sometimes the default keyboard navigation doesn't work great with the designs and features we create. This is where custom keyboard navigation and ARIA come in. ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) is a set of roles and attributes that define ways to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. This allows legally blind people to navigate our websites with their keyboard, and still understand the content in a way that's meaningful to them.
Ready to Meet the Team?
Schedule a call with an Andrilla Team Member so we can get to know you and your vision, and create a plan for it.