I was contracted by a local company to build this “mini-site” for UPS alongside a designer, who also contributed to the front-end development to some extent. The site represents a unique workflow and design challenge. Nothing on this site was allowed to utilize a database, as it needed to be deliverable with little to no setup required.
The project was built on the Symfony2 framework for routing with Twig templating. All content was built to be editable through YAML files. Then, a Symfony2 exporter command was written to crawl the site and export the entire thing as “flat” files. So, when content updates are necessary, the client can simply update a yml file, and run the exporter again. The site features a number of notable UX elements.
Features
- AJAX-loaded modals for articles with “next” and “previous”
- HTML5 history API manipulation with the History.js library for modal URLs
- Interactive SVG highlighting
- Custom, CSS-only slider
- Site-history cookie (necessary for our sans-database setup) for marking viewed articles with a checkmark
