Creators.com
One of the biggest projects I took on in my time at Creators was rebuilding the company's main website, Creators.com. The version of the site they had when I came in was built by a third-party company and had gone through so many leadership and stylistic changes it may have been built by Dr. Frankenstein. Together with designer Sarah Kruberg, we built a stylish site that emphasizes Creators' core values and serves as a sales tool and consumer site.
The Client
Creators, specifically my supervisor Jack Newcombe, was the client.
My Role
I built the back-end and server architecture. I also built a deployment structure controlled by messages in a Hipchat channel -- my first foray into ChatOps.
Technology Used
The back-end runs on PHP and CodeIgniter, the front-end is heavily customized Bootstrap. The site runs entirely on AWS: An Elastic Load Balancer balances traffic between multiple swap-able EC2 instances. The database runs on RDS, static files are stored on S3 and cached by CloudFront.
About the Code
This redesign took nearly a year to complete. The code base is extensive because the number of things the site does is immense.
My main focus on the project was to make the site functional and fast. The previous version of the site had server response times in the 1-2 second range, my goal was to bring that down to 0.2 seconds (it averages 0.3 seconds in production)
Images
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Home Page -
Column page -
Content page
