One of my very good friends is a co founder of Curious Minds, She one day asked me to check over her website. I had to delicately tell her that her website was in desperate need of improvements.
Her initial website was built in Wix. Wix is great but it often does not guide users down the right path. It does not provide structure and guidance and can add undue pressure when a cms editor only wants to worry about their content.
I provided a report on the suggested improvements and we decided to build a Silverstripe website. I contracted in a designer friend who I have worked with before. We help some google hangouts calls to try and gather the requirements. The team was completely remote, the designer and I based in Wellington and the Curious Minds team based in Christchurch. This project also happened over lockdown.
We managed to navigate that landscape well and once the design was approved, we continued with the build.
As the product owner on Curious Minds' side was a very good friend of mine we both needed to keep our working relationship seperate. I found we did this well as we are still very good friends.
Curious Minds was built with Silverstripe 4 for the cms. This allows cms users to focus solely on the content and not having to worry so much about the design of the pages and trying to make sure the templates are consistent across pages.
For the front end I used pure-css using BEM. I find this keeps the compiled files for the site lite weight improving performance.
Curious Minds has more than just HTTS for security, HTTPS itself is not enough these days to keep a website secure.
Curious Minds follows accessible practices. The colours contract well to meet accessible standards.
I used Javascript (ES6, not jQuery) to build custom functionality to allow international students to apply to use curious minds' services. A user needed to enquire and get a personalised link that was unique and secure. This was a workaround to prevent us needing to create a login/register system.
Once the student enquires, they will then have to undertake a quiz. This quiz is generated automatically and draws from a random pool of questions to ensure that each quiz is unique.
The form uses a mix of ES6 and ajax to run.
I used Gulp and Sass to manage the css. This allowed me to do things like change the logo and colour scheme easily based on the scheme chosen by the cms user.
Imagine if you could give seeds of curiosity a formal learning path?, Check out Curious Minds