Favorite Project from Earlier in my Professional Career

Over the years I have gotten to work on some really awesome projects. Every day I count as a blessing to be able to do the work that I do. When thinking of a favorite project to showcase, I automatically think of the work that we did on Bucket-Outlet.com while I worked at Red Hill General Store (RHGS). That first web development job was where I finally had a chance to apply knowledge to something and get paid for it. I will always be grateful for the opportunity that Tom gave me to work for his company. The small locally owned and operated business was home for 3 years and allowed me to work on various projects and technologies. Of the 13 niche websites we worked on, Bucket-Outlet.com may have been my favorite (I will probably say the same about a few of the others too).

Bucket-Outlet.com

Bucket Outlet sounds like an odd website to work on, but believe it or not, RGHS sold a ton of buckets and had a warehouse full of them. All of the websites we had to work on at RHGS were older and were somewhat stuck in the ’90s (you know when Amazon only sold books; if you don’t know, check the way back machine and see their site in the ’90s). The most significant push we had for Bucket Outlet was to improve the SEO of the website, and that guided every decision. We had keywords written everywhere and page content was created with this newly minted content. But there was one problem, the site was still dated and needed a better look and feel.

Screenshot of the dated Bucket Outlet website with static content.

Bucket Outlet design before update

Bucket Outlet after redesign and updated graphics

Bucket Outlet after the update

Bucket Outlet was updated with new keywords and a new design, but there was something else that we did and it is something I am proud of. We optimized the site two more ways, by creating dynamically generated pages and making the site mobile-friendly with responsive design.

Dynamic Menus

One of my favorite things to work on in this project was something that sounds boring to most people, we built a database. Yes! A database! I know, I am this weird geek who enjoyed the project’s backend code. The database was a thing of beauty that allowed us to dynamically serve products to customers and improve the user experience on the website.

snippet of a screenshot showing dynamic menu filtering feature

Product menus now include dynamic filtering for bucket shape, size, material, and finish/color.

snippet of a screenshot showing dynamic color filtering menu

One page offered a dynamically filtered menu using color options available.

snippet of screenshot showing color selection on a product page

Individual product pages could now show all of the color options for the given product. Previously each color had its own page.

Mobile Friendliness

In our pursuit of SEO, Google began penalizing websites for not being mobile-friendly. So we had to make sure all of the RHGS websites were mobile-friendly, and Bucket Outlet may have been the first one to get the responsive design treatment. Simply, I had to learn this skill and how CSS3 offered the new idea of media queries (media queries were introduced with CSS2) now see the size of the screen viewing the page. With a few sizes queried in our CSS, we could allow our page elements to stack and be viewed easily on a mobile device.

screenshot of a mobile view that shows page elements stacking on the homepage

There is obviously more to this project that we did to make the site better for Google search results, and the customer. But I am not going to tell you everything, what is the fun of that? I know that the work we did had a positive impact on the website and hopefully the company, but I am happy with how it turned out at that time in my career. I also had a blast working on the website. Did I mention it was my favorite RGHS website?