◆ Project profile
424 Solutions
The Hydrogen rebuild transformed 424solutions.com from a traditional agency website into both a business platform and a working demonstration of what 424 Solutions can build. By pairing Shopify's commerce infrastructure with a fully custom Hydrogen frontend, we gained greater development freedom, strong performance, and the ability to create experiences that would be difficult or impractical within a conventional theme. The polished pages explain what we do. The more ambitious interactions throughout the site show what happens when we are given room to get creative.
- Shopify + Hydrogen
- Web Design and Development
- Web Design
- Web Development
- Custom Build
01 / The challenge
What needed to work better.
424 Solutions had outgrown the kind of website we typically build for clients. As the business expanded from straightforward Shopify and WordPress projects into custom themes, Shopify apps, internal tools, and more advanced development, the website needed to better represent what the company had become. It also needed to serve several different audiences without feeling fragmented, from small businesses looking for a complete website build to merchants interested in themes, apps, and more specialized development. Performance and flexibility were equally important. Rather than forcing increasingly ambitious ideas into a traditional theme architecture, we wanted a foundation that gave us complete control over the frontend and enough freedom to experiment.
02 / The build
How 424 approached it.
We rebuilt 424solutions.com as a custom Hydrogen storefront, using Shopify as the commerce backend while moving the frontend into a React-based headless architecture. That approach gave us far greater control over layout, interactions, performance, and how content is presented throughout the site. Instead of designing around the limitations of a traditional Shopify theme, each experience could be built specifically around its purpose while Shopify continued to handle products, checkout, customer data, and commerce functionality. We also treated the website itself as part of the portfolio. Throughout the site, more experimental interactions, motion, visual effects, and custom interface elements are used intentionally to push beyond a typical agency layout. Those features help express the creative side of 424 Solutions, but they also serve a more practical purpose: demonstrating the kinds of unusual, highly customized experiences we are capable of building when a project calls for something beyond standard theme functionality. The result is a site that does more than explain our development capabilities. It actively demonstrates them. The structure was also rebuilt around the work 424 Solutions offers today, including custom Shopify development, WordPress builds, site improvements, apps, themes, and specialized ecommerce projects. Portfolio content and process pages give prospective clients a clearer understanding of both what we build and how we approach a project. Because the site is our own development environment, the Hydrogen architecture also gives us room to continue experimenting with new interfaces, integrations, performance techniques, and genuinely strange ideas without having to rebuild the foundation every time we decide to try something new.
◆ Build sheet
The systems behind the site.
Feature
Advanced Site Build
Feature
Responsive and Fast
Feature
Advanced Animations
Feature
Hidden Easter Eggs
Technology
Shopify
Technology
Hydrogen
Technology
React
Technology
React Router