Chase Maier
Technical Lead & Senior Software Engineer
Project Details
Project Tags
The following tags have been assigned:
Media Gallery
Bella Apartments
This project was done as part of my work as owner and lead developer with GigaShock, LLC. This project consisted of a number of phases and the end result was deployed to over a dozen individual websites and continued deployments of future websites are planned as more property acquisitions occur. The owners of a more than a dozen rental apartments spread throughout Arizona asked that we design a website template that would be used as a visual basis for creating an individual website for each of the rental properties.
To begin, we took an existing purely Flash website design created for the owners in the years past by another design company that was not meeting their needs and used the general visual appearance as a basis for creating a brand new visual site template using standards compliant HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These changes were important to ensure that the website was as easily usable and accessible as possible. The transition from Flash to a traditional website increased the search engine optimization (SEO) impact of the website's content, allows computers and devices which do not support Flash content to view the website, allows the use of the site by mobile devices, and made the process of updating page content much simpler in addition to a variety of other benefits.
After the new HTML template had been finalized, I spent some time and created a small lightweight framework for the site in PHP to make the process of maintaining a single theme and updating the sites easier and to manage features that would be incorporated into each site such as an image photo gallery and a list of affiliated properties. Several other technologies were also used throughout the site. JavaScript was used throughout the site for creating enlarged thumbnails when a user hovers their mouse over a thumbnail image, to generate an interactive Walk Score map indicating features surrounding the property, and to handle the transition of images in the image gallery section of the site. A utility from Google was also incorporated into the site which can be used to, using JavaScript, translate the content of the page into a different language. In this case the ability to display the site's content in Spanish was a valuable addition for the website's intended demographic audience. Each site also included a web form - and the associated backend form processing logic in PHP - that could be used by residents residing in the community to report maintenance issues associated with their apartment using the Internet. The maintenance staff at the community could then use these online requests to drive their daily work flow.
With the help of our graphics artist, Stephen Krings, we were also able to create a set of very high quality illustrations representing the different floor plans available for each property as well as a detailed site plan representing the layout and features of the community for each property that were used on the website as well as in the company's printed materials and advertising. An example of a few of these documents as well as several pages from a single instance of this site template's deployment can be seen in the media gallery on this page.
