Adapt or Die: 25 Years of Web Design at JABA

By Adrian Adams — Founder, Owner & Creative Director, JABA Web Design 
 

When I designed my first website in 1995, the web felt like fresh paint. That year I built Festival of the Dreaming—the first ever website for the Olympic Games and part of the cultural arts festival sites attached to the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000.

Back then, designers could do almost everything in Dreamweaver; you sketched, you sliced, you shipped. For the “wow” moments, I teamed up with my long-time technical partner Declan Brennan. Together we pushed boundaries—an animated masthead in 1995 was genuinely gobsmacking—and it set a bar I’ve been chasing ever since.

A lot has changed. Our mantra hasn’t: adapt or die.

The Dreamweaver Years (1995–2001)

Those early days were fast, fragile and fun. Designers wrote most of the code, and the browser wars made every pixel a negotiation. Dreamweaver gave creators like me the keys to the whole house: layout, images, interactivity. But as client expectations grew and the web matured, we could see the future would belong to teams, process and platforms—not just individual craft.

One of Australia’s Early CMS Pioneers (2002)

In 2001, with support from the South Australian Government’s Innovation Centre and Microsoft, Declan and I started building what became one of Australia’s early content management systems. In 2002 we launched our first CMS. It changed how we worked—and how our clients worked with us.

Suddenly, content was a living thing. Clients could publish without calling a developer. Design had to evolve too—no more fixed canvas; components needed to be editable, reusable and resilient. That shift taught us a lasting lesson: great digital design isn’t just what it looks like; it’s how easily it can be maintained and improved.

Bespoke by Choice

Plenty of agencies moved to off-the-shelf platforms. We chose a different path: keep refining our bespoke CMS because it let us shape the experience around each client, not the other way round. That decision demanded more of us—more engineering, more QA, more responsibility—but it gave us control over performance, security and editor experience. Two decades later, we’re still evolving that platform. Today it’s CMSv7.

The PWA Pivot (2018–Today)

In 2018 we adapted again, re-architecting our CMS to power Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)—websites that behave like apps: incredibly fast, installable, secure and reliable on poor connections. PWAs were pioneered by Google and adopted widely in the US; we set about leading the charge in Australia.

Since then we’ve launched 170+ PWAs, all published through CMSv7. For clients, that’s meant:

• Blazing speed and better SEO outcomes
• App-like UX with “add to home screen”
• Offline resilience in the real world
• One codebase across devices—less cost, fewer headaches

PWAs aren’t a trend for us; they’re the logical next step in performance, usability and maintainability.

What 25+ Years Has Taught Me

1) Design for editors, not just end-users.
If your team can’t update the site quickly and safely, the design will decay.

2) Simplicity scales.
From 1995 animations to 2025 PWAs, the work that lasts is clean, fast and purposeful.

3) Own your stack (prudently).
A bespoke platform is more responsibility—but it lets you move when the market moves.

4) Process beats heroics.
Standards, testing, documentation and governance protect clients long after launch day.

5) Keep learning or get left behind.
The tools have changed—Dreamweaver gave way to CI/CD pipelines, service workers and design systems—but curiosity still does the heavy lifting.

Why JABA Still Builds Differently

• Experience you can feel: I’ve been designing for the web since 1995; JABA’s been building commercially since 2000. That’s a lot of launches and lessons baked in.
• Technology with a point: CMSv7 + PWAs give clients speed, security and simple editing—without the plugin roulette.
• Long-term thinking: Many of our clients have stayed for a decade or more because the sites are easy to run and keep getting better.
• A culture of care: We don’t ship and vanish. We host, maintain, measure and improve—because digital is never “done”.

Adapt or Die (and We’re Very Much Alive)

From a gobsmacking animated masthead to installable web apps, the story is the same: stay curious, build what’s next, and keep it useful. That’s how we’ve lasted, and that’s how we’ll keep serving Australian businesses who need their websites to work harder and faster.

If you’d like to talk about upgrading to a PWA, migrating to CMSv7, or simply making your site easier to manage day-to-day, I’d love to help.
 

Adrian Adams
Founder & Creative Director, JABA Web Design

PS: Got an older site you still “live with” because it’s too hard to edit? Let’s fix that. Adapt—or better yet, let us adapt it for you.