In the Fall of 2013 I accepted a position working remotely as a Web Developer for Aydus Consulting, a small company specializing in developing e-commerce websites. My work was concentrated mostly on the front-end, writing extensive CSS and LESS documents to bring highly customized designs to out-of-the-box Magento installations. I also spearheaded the development of a “base” template to allow any fresh Magento installation to be quickly made into a responsive site. On top of my front-end work, I also did a considerable amount of server side work building widgets and extensions for Magento and general custom code in ASP.NET StoreFront.
BleacherCreatures
BleacherCreatures was probably my biggest undertaking with Aydus. I was responsible for the vast majority of custom development on this project, both server-side and client-side. Along with adapting the site to use the responsive template I’d already developed for earlier sites, I also created a clean front-end for multi-select filtering of products and built a reusable extension to insert a custom mega menu from Magento’s implementation of categories.
The design of this site presented several very complex problems, starting with the menu. I wanted to use the same simple HTML for both the full size and mobile views of the menu, and using some very intensive CSS and JavaScript I was able to accomplish it. Additionally, I was able to create the frontpage banner such that it resized by first cropping the edges of the primary image before beginning to scale the entire thing.
Preserve
One of the last projects I worked on for Aydus was Preserve, Blake Lively’s lifestlye blog/online store. The site was a major undertaking, including significant custom funcitonality to “preserve” products and stories in a manner similar to a wish list, and extensive integration between the Magento platform running the eCommerce store and the WordPress back-end that controlled the blog element.
Because of the sheer enormity of the project, quite a few developers had a hand in this project. My biggest contributions were the customization of the “My Account” section, the responsive flow of the “Shop” section, and various JavaScript bits throughout all areas of the site.
GearExpress
GearExpress was a major project for us, and my duties on the front end were shared with anther developer. My focal point was the “base” template for the site, that is, basic pages included with every Magento installation that still need to be styled and configured. These pages include the shopping cart, checkout pages, and all pages in the accounts section. I not only styled these pages on this project, but also created a bottom layer of styles that could be used on any Magento site to make it instantly responsive.
DealGenius
I was the only front-end developer on this project, so I worked on not only the base pages described above, but everything else as well. I responsively styled the entire site, and also added in some JavaScript functionality to smooth the user experience.