Woobox Website Overhaul
We had the website redesigned and coded (both jobs contracted out) sometime around 2012 (I believe), but by 2014 it just wasn't cutting it anymore. Especially for me, as I was pretty much the only person working with the main site content, it was more of a hassle than anything to work with all the bad coding that was done on the initial dev for it. Additionally, the site wasn't responsive, and we found that there were many user questions coming in that should have been answered by simply looking at the information within the site, but wasn't clear to the majority of users. And so, we decided to embark on a redesign of the whole site. Unfortunately, I left before this could be truly finished and implemented (thus, it never was used), but felt it was a worthwhile project to include in my portfolio.
Redesigning & Reorganizing
After playing around with some ideas for the layout and flow of the site, I decided it would be easiest to start completely from scratch with the coding, and take bits and pieces of the old site's code as needed. The backend stuff was mostly unchanged, although I did do some serious reorganizing in that area as well, in order to make the content changes easier for our developers once I had left (since their expertise was generally in backend/PHP work, I thought it'd be easier for them to make changes if I kept as much of the content and such on their side).
Reorganizing the code and the way it was all put together also allowed me to keep things much more in sync, and made changes easier to implement (because all you'd have to do is go into the database stuff and switch out a word/color/etc. instead of going into each page within the site and making changes individually).
The CSS for the old site was truly a mess, and that was the most fun to re-code, in my opinion. Instead of having huge files that had to be loaded on each page (with a lot of code that wasn't needed for most of the pages), I broke it up and made it all more universal (along with the HTML), so that we didn't need so much repeated code for things that should look the same.
The [un]Finished Product
As I said above, my work never saw the light of day, as it were, but I really enjoyed the project overall. It was a great experience in working with databases and the backend side of things, as well as really creating the frontend code from scratch. My changes made the site easier to read and navigate, and made the entire thing responsive. Although the end-result wasn't ever used, nor was it really "finished" at the time that I left, I felt it was a great improvement from the website we had, both looking at it from a user's standpoint or a developer's.
Screenshots of the New Site
Screenshots of the Old Site (for comparison)
