Adam Gregory

Background

When the HeartStyles project started, founders Stephen and Mara Klemich we're ready to let the world know about their labor of love The HeartStyles Charachter Assesment. It started out as a .NET built site in Austrailia and when the Klemich to came to us to relaunch the brand and website we decided to rewrite it into PHP and Drupal.

 

This process started with an brand evaluation. We took time to ascertain the who, what, and why of HearStyles. After getting a handle on the brand and how we could take it to the next level, we began to evaluate the algorithim used to calculate the assesment results. We took that algorithim rewrote the web code into Drupal and began work on getting the site ready for launch. It sounds simple but this was a long and thorough process that took many months to complete.

 

After spending the October - December putting the site through Alpha and Beta testing with various groups. Analysing the feedback from testing, tweaking the application, testing somemore and repeating the process a few times, the site was deemed ready to go a week before the January deadline. The Klemichs were so thrilled with the results they showered us with praise, floweres, and a big gift basket.

 

Technicals

The site is built on Drupal 6 and uses most of the basic modules needed for building a great site, Viws, CCK, Taxonomy, Date, etc... A custom module was required in order to build out the HeartStyles Assessment. I coded the initial module and then realized that it would soon begin to get bloated. Wanting to keep down load times, optimize the site and make it easier to maintain in the future, I began to split module into seperate modules for each function of the assessment, all tied together by one parent/framework module. The result ended up being 5 different modules: 1 for the framework/assesment/registration, 1 for the results, 1 for the PDF generation,1 for the promo codes, and 1 for credit proccessing. As a result the code is very extensible annd uses a series of hooks to accomplish it's tasks

 

The front end of the site is built in a custom Drupal theme. As with most of my custom themes I integrate a site specific module to accomplish many of thehook_alters and such that are not available in the themes template.php. It is built with XHTML/CSS and uses jQuery throughout for some effects and UIX elements. Some of the jQuery is accomplsihed using plugins, but a good bit of it is custom coded just for the site. For example the results dashboard is a tabbed interface and rather then using a plugin for a single page of the site, I felt it would be quicker and more productive to build a quick tabing script for that section.

 

All together it took about 8 months of my development time from start trough testing and on to launch to complete the HeartStyles website. Overall it's a great example of good coding and solid web development