Weeknotes 19:15, Part 1 – New Project and Project Launch

October 14, 2019

Week of October 6-12

After starting a new project at the end of the previous week, I was asked to turn my attention to another project this week. We had been considering having an outside contractor work on this project as we are trying to find another developer to join our team. But none of the potential candidates thought they could get in done in the timeframe we needed so I got tasked with it.

The week got off to a slow start. Due to some things going on at home, I ended up needing to take some time off on Monday to give it attention. The situation also was a bit of a distraction on Tuesday. I finally was able to get some focused work done on Wednesday. And then on Thursday, I really got into a flow and really enjoyed the day.

A couple of weeks ago I referenced this tweet:

I really do enjoy working on new UIs. And I also enjoy building sites in WordPress using Advanced Custom Fields. I came up with several solutions to take advantage of WordPress queries and custom post types to create navigation and content listings. I really enjoyed seeing the site come together on both Thursday and Friday. I came up with a solution to use a section title to create section anchors using PHP string replacment to make those ids friendly when those section title contains characters that are not allowed. I needed the section anchors to create a sidebar navigation to jump to different parts of the content on the page.

Mobile First by Building Desktop-First

I am a firm believer in building a site with a mobile-first mentality.  But I have been approaching site builds a bit differently on recent projects. Almost all these projects just have a mockup for the desktop view. So in order to quickly get up and running, I have decided to build desktop-first and then I go back and make adjustments for both mobile and tablets. I am still writing my stylesheets as mobile-first (starting with mobile styles and then using media queries to make changes to the design as the screen width get wider). I am just having to go back and refactor my CSS and move the initial styles into media queries.

Another thing different about this project is that only 3 of the pages have full design mockups and the rest of the pages are in wireframes. I have been able to take cues from the fully designed pages to make these other pages from wireframes come to life.

5..4..3..2..1.. Site Launch

Another LGND project that I worked on launched last week. We created a one-page site with scroll animations. It was part of a campaign to lobby Congress to address skyrocketing prescription prices.

Site that I built for AARP Prescription Drug Campaign launched last week.
There is also Spanish version.

I worked with two designers on our team with this one. Jason designed the site and Jonathan designed the animations for each section in After Effects. I used the Lottie script by the AirBnB team to implement those animations. The scroll animations were a combination of GreenSock and fullPage.

The AARP team was really delighted by our solution. It was highlighted on their homepage last week.

New Teammate

We have had several changes to our team over the last month. We have said goodbye to three teammates and we just welcomed a very talented person as an account director. Leyla found out about LGND through her last position at the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. LGND has done several projects for the Academy including a report on the complexities of cancer control that I mentioned last week. Though she had not worked on these projects at the Academy, she had heard high praise from her teammates who had worked with us.

I had a virtual coffee with her on Friday so that we could get to know one another. I look forward to working on some future projects together.

Read Part Two – Readings, Reading List, Sites That Caught My Eye, and Watched

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