Archives for August 2019

Bespoke From the Ground-Up

This brand-new website was the result of due diligence in planning and making a solid foundation for the massive amount of information that needed to be presented. Planning started before I got hired at Pleth, and soon after my hire date I was tasked with making sure that their server environment was safe, secure, and robust enough to handle heavy traffic situations. A 3-tier VPC environment with auto-scaling capabilities was the solution.

The site’s base theme is Bootstrap, which ensured a great responsive experience. Custom templates were made for individual page content elements (Twig). Many new templates, views, content types, and taxonomies have been added by our team since the site launched. We have also incorporated other clinic homepages into the site and these domains are also routed through the load balancer with HTTPS termination.

Getting Everything Straight

When I took over D&D of this website, it was five years old. There were *Thirty Six* WordPress plugins installed on the site. Needless to say, it was running a tad bit sluggish. My first task was to clean this up a bit.

The client needed several landing pages developed, and when they needed them, they needed them very quickly. They also had to package up the fields and send them to their CRM. Using the Gravity Forms plugin (I’m a huge fan) and PHP, I was able to grab the submitted info from the form submission and package it into a JSON object, where it was then posted to their CRM’s API.

Email Image Hosting Through CDN

At this point, through many meetings and conversations where I recommended that they upgrade their setup, the client was starting to see the benefits of moving to a more robust system such as Drupal to meet their ever-scaling needs. They were also interested in having their own dedicated server for various reasons. One of those reasons was having a place to host images that a third-party graphic designer was making for their email campaigns. Since they were on a shared hosting environment, we needed to find an interim solution.

That solution came in the form of a string of AWS services. The graphic designer straight-up required that he have SFTP access to upload his images, and no other method would work for him. So, I delivered. A t3.nano EC2 instance was used as an intermediary between the designer and an S3 bucket, providing the interface desired. A CloudFront distribution was put in front of the S3 bucket to serve the files, and Route53 was used to give each image a more digestible URL.

The 10-Hour Challenge

Content was ready, assets were selected and made, and I was told to make both of these sister sites as fast as possible to maximize profit. Challenge accepted. I decided to go to work with the Genesis Framework and one of their awesome pre-built themes.

After deploying both staging sites, completely building out one and copying to the other to its environment, and then putting content and adjusting styles on the second site, the total clocked time was just about 6 hours after adjustments and reviews. There’s nothing too fancy about it, but there’s also some very clever CSS because my Project Manager decided that he wanted all of the interior page content separated into containers like it was in the mock-up. Since adjusting the theme would have taken forever, I decided to get creative with borders in order to give the illusion that the sections were separated. It still did great on screen readers and was fully responsive, and the PM was happy, so we did launch checks and put them into production.

Flexing My Photoshop Skills

We came together on this in 2015 when I mentioned to her that I do freelance web development on the side. She wanted a site, I needed a steady supply of haircuts and beard trims. The only problem was that she didn’t have any visual content. We solved this by using the camera on my phone and doing a couple of shoot sessions, and then I got to work on Photoshop. We also ended up using some select photos as the backgrounds for the sections on her site.

The original is the first displayed to the left. The colors that the phone captured weren’t as vibrant as we wanted. She had one weird light bulb over her chair that was changing the color of her hair to red. We were also shooting on a phone that had plenty of megapixels, but it wasn’t one of those fancy ones that we have now that have two/three lenses and can give a native focus effect. All of the focus work was done in Photoshop. The kid that she was cutting on also had some blemishes on his forehead, so I corrected that also.

After everything was done, I presented her with some options and she decided to go black-and-white with the photo (it was definitely more her style).

Once that was complete, we gathered up all of the content that we wanted and implemented a WordPress site using the Sydney theme. We integrated her SetMore booking plugin and she was good to go. I made some vector icons in Illustrator for her hours, created a custom menu with dot leaders (I’ve since changed it under her direction), and set up a Google My Business profile.

Her business has exploded over the last few years. Most of it is absolutely attributed to her being absolutely amazing at her craft, but I’d like to think her website played a part. We’re also working on a redesign soon to further align with her current style and mindset.