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Tyler Denton

Web Developer, Solutions Architect

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tyler

Blue Shield of California – DCO

November 1, 2021 By tyler

Blue Shield of California – DCO Campaigns

Blue Shield of California provides insurance solutions for the state of California, including Medicare supplement plans for seniors. Our focus here was their DCO campaigns, which included creative files from their previous agency. We also made net-new creatives and dynamic feeds for their insurance AEP season.

Not only did I lead and manage my team for planning and execution of this project, but I also did the vast majority of the DCO rebuild.

Platform: Doubleclick Studio, Display & Video 360
Tooling: Google Web Designer, Excel, Adobe Suite (XD, Illustrator, Photoshop)

The Rebuild

When we acquired this client in early 2021, they had a DCO build from their previous agency partner that they needed to put back into production immediately and they needed it to be as close to exactly the same as it was before. Unfortunately, due to the nature of Doubleclick Studio and the way these creatives and feeds were built, they weren’t in a state to just immediately start serving again. BSC’s relationship with their previous agency had went sour and they were unwilling to provide support and key pieces of the puzzle, so we had to scramble to get everything back in order.

After a large amount of planning, reworking, and unfortunate licensure issues, we were able to get their DCO campaigns back up and running. 70+ Google Web Designer creatives were condensed into one versatile creative, and hundreds of dynamic feeds were condensed into one feed sheet. The final row count for the feed was well over 500,000 lines, which lined up with the previous agency’s strategy.

Leveraging Excel and VB.NET for Accuracy and Agility

Condensing all of these copy variations, images, landing URLs, etc. was a monumental feat, and I had to find a way to keep everything correct, accurate, and easily changed while maintaining the integrity of the feeds. After a lot of research, Excel ended up being the solution of choice here. There were a few feeds needed after the initial rebuild of their initial DCO approach, and each feed received a master Excel sheet. Power Query was utilized to generate all of the copy, line item ID, image, and reporting label combinations automatically, and a few VB.NET macros had to be built to manage and augment this process. Version control was introduced to these sheets via Git to make sure any changes could be reverted should any problems be found.

Google Web Designer – Situational Superiority

While I had many reservations about Google Web Designer as a product, it does DCO extremely well. My team’s perseverance in learning the quirks of this program was nothing but inspirational, and we got to the point where we could do a ton of creative work in very little time.

Dynamic creatives were used to implement responsive sizing requirements where needed, and we leveraged the code view of this program to implement several interesting features that didn’t come out of the box with GWD, like DV360 dynamic query strings for our landing URLs and logic to change creative layouts based on incoming dynamic elements combined with real-time creative sizing.

While most of us scoffed at using this thing for anything remotely close to web development, it ended up being an extremely valuable tool for implementing HTML5-based advertising solutions, and I would now recommend it to anyone needing tools for this purpose.

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Iora Primary Care

August 29, 2021 By tyler

Iora Primary Care

Iora Primary Care is a network of doctor’s offices for seniors with locations throughout the United States. Our team rebuilt this website from the ground-up, working closely with the client to provide an intuitive framework for building clinic pages, team pages, blog posts, events, and more for dozens of clinics.

As lead developer on this project, I developed a large part of the core functionality of this site and oversaw the rest.

Platform: WordPress
Hosting: Pantheon
Plugins: Advanced Custom Fields Pro, Yoast, Events Manager Pro, WordPress Multilingual

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Dynamic Clinic Pages

Given the diversity of each clinic in their network, our team set out to create a flexible and easy-to-use dashboard implementation so that the client could focus more on content entry and spend less time worrying about clinic page consistency and formatting. This was especially important since most of the site’s content needed both English and Spanish versions.

As lead developer on this project, my primary concern for the clinic pages was to build streamlined, robust theme templates and dashboard views that met these requirements. Naturally, my team and I turned to Advanced Custom Fields Pro to bridge that gap. The core theme template included functionality to order and omit sections based on client preference for that clinic, and each individual section had its own template partial to keep the code tidy and modular.

Team Member Pages & Relationships

This project also required individual team member pages as well as the ability for clinic pages to display information about their respective team members. The client also wanted to be able to choose the order of how the team members were displayed on the clinic pages based on their job title, as well as display a random doctor in their spotlight section if that doctor wasn’t opted out.

One of the challenges of this project was to take their previous site’s data on each clinic’s team members and translate that data into our new format, relating each team member to their respective clinic(s) (a team member could work at multiple clinics).

Analytics, Design, SEO, & Other Requirements

I coordinated my team with several other teams so that we could provide the best possible final product. Integrations included Google Tag Manager, Yoast, Salesforce, Yext Answers, and many more other third-party tools and integrations

There is much, much more about this project that can be detailed here, such as custom insurance post types, custom blog types, an events manager, Pantheon…the list goes on and on. If you would like to know more, just ask!

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White River Health System

August 9, 2019 By tyler

White River Health Systems

White River Health Systems is a network of clinics and hospitals in the North Central Arkansas area. This site has tons of content that needed to be organized and presented in an organized fashion. Our team met the challenge. They were also outfitted with an AWS 3-tier VPC environment for their site and sub-sites. Advanced analytic capabilities were requested and I added those myself via AWS and Google services.

Platform: Drupal 8
AWS Services: EC2, RDS, VPC, ELB, API Gateway, Lambda
Other: Google Sheets, Google Data Studio

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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.

Introducing Pleth’s Advanced Analytics

The client said that they wanted more detailed behavioral details on the website than Google Analytics could provide, so I came up with a solution. Using JavaScript event listeners, we could record even smaller things like mouse-overs, button clicks, and etc. That data would then be sent by the back-end to Google Sheets via Google API, and then that data was imported into a Google Data Studio report that a colleague made in order to be formatted for readability.

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Lacroix Precision Optics

August 9, 2019 By tyler

Lacroix Precision Optics
Automated Quote System

This client makes precision optics (lenses, etc.) for customers all around the world. They wanted to implement an automated quote system for use on the website and to connect to a third-party lens design program.

I was the sole developer for the duration of this project.

Platform: Drupal 8
AWS Services: API Gateway, Lambda, S3, Cognito, EC2, RDS, Route53, CodeCommit, IAM

Lacroix Precision Optics Website
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This was a massive one-man undertaking.

…but ultimately, everything came together. The client designed a program that would input the specifications, dimensions, and materials of a proposed lens design and then output a cost estimation for each lens that was provided. The program accepted and returned XML and had an accompanying rule document that needed to be easily changed by non-programmers if the need were to arise. The client’s customers also needed federated logins so that they could make quote requests by uploading XML lens specification documents and also by using CAD-like lens design software to send the quote request to an API, all with the same login credentials. An out-of-scope feature request was made after development started for all user sign-ups to be fed through a Hubspot form.

I modified their Drupal 8 site on both the front-end and back-end to facilitate these changes. Using a contributed module that I lightly modified, I was able to augment the Drupal 8 user functionality to tie directly into AWS Cognito to manage federated logins between the website and API requests. A back-end module was also made to send requests back and forth between the quote API using a handler for the Webform contrib module. Front-end work was done to present and style these interfaces (HTML, CSS, Twig, JavaScript).

AWS is a Godsend

I learned so, so much about AWS during this project. The API Gateway had to be immediately modified to accommodate for the XML to be passed through to the Lambda function. Cognito was assigned as an authorizer for any requests made to the endpoint, and an S3 bucket was made to hold the ruleset so that the Lambda function could quickly and easily access the configuration data. The Python program that the client provided had quite a few dependencies that needed to be compiled specifically for Amazon Linux since that’s the OS that Lambda uses, so SSH access was granted on their private dedicated server to accommodate for these needs.

AWS Logo

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Zips Carwash

August 9, 2019 By tyler

Zips Car Wash
Procedural Email, Landing Pages
Content Delivery Network

Zips Car Wash is a business that has seen explosive growth in the last few years. Pleth has been their web services since the early stages, and scaling their current site to meet their growth demands has been a challenge.

Platform: WordPress
AWS Services: EC2, RDS, CloudFront, S3

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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.

On-the-fly Customization & Personalization

The Client wanted to start selling car wash memberships, gift cards, and plans on their website. Naturally, this means that WooCommerce became involved. Our team got to work on creating products and variations for over 100 stores and we trained the client on how to effectively update these items and location information.

For the memberships, however, there was a completely different process for the customer to redeem their purchase, and this meant that there needed to be special instructions and imagery included in the emailed receipts based on which products were present in the order. The client also required that the regional manager receive an emailed notification so that they could verify that the purchase was legit. All of this required digging into the back-end and making custom WooCommerce templates.

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.

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Families, Inc.

August 8, 2019 By tyler

Families, Inc.
Employee Application Storage
Review Link Forwarding

This Drupal 7 site uses the Webforms module extensively. We wanted to give them an extremely secure way to store their applications, so AWS S3 came into play to separate their concerns.

Later on, they also needed some links to get people to their Google reviews faster. Easier said than done.

Platform: Drupal 7
AWS Services: S3

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Keeping Everything Secure

When I first arrived at Pleth, this was one of the first projects that I collaborated on. The question was: How do we keep these uploaded resumes, applications, etc. as secure as possible, like Fort Knox-secure? Like a lot of my other solutions, I looked to AWS.

The content that was generated after an application submission was sent off-server to a completely locked-down and encrypted S3 bucket, and we had the only keys. This was accomplished with a custom D7 module that used the AWS PHP SDK to securely send information back-and-forth as needed, and I won’t divulge much more than that.

Some time later, the client wanted to fast-track people to their Google reviews by means of links that included their domain name. The first obvious solution was to run it through the host records. However, we found that when the link was posted on Facebook, a query string was automatically appended to the end of the link and that just screwed everything up (thanks Zuckerberg). The answer was to do all of the routing/redirecting from the root htaccess file on the site, and any linking that had the fbclid query string was immediately stripped of it using regular expressions.

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