Our Watch

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Dan Laush

Helped a non-profit on their mission to change the conversation around violence against women with a family of static sites.

A desktop screenshot of the Our Watch hub for workplace violence against women

Project, in brief

  • Domestic violence research group pursuing nationwide behavioural change
  • Needed to create "hub" sites about particular topics with shared resources across the family of sites
  • Project deliverables
    • Nuxt application to static generate each hub site
    • A Single-Page Application "preview" mode for content editors to see the site with data direct from the CMS
    • Modular site design to easily support new web properties
    • WordPress multi-site as a headless CMS, with shared media library and ACF data models

My role

  • Led development of Nuxt front-end application
  • Worked with digital designer who built static templates in HTML/CSS
    • Converted static components to dynamic components in the Vue app
    • Advised on accessibility of digital designs
  • Coordinated with developers of CMS+API and DevOps/deployment workflow

Learnings/notes

  • Working with a digital designer was excellent. I was able to focus on business logic and the designer made sure the web reflected their design vision, without the intermediary flat design file.
  • Static sites are faaaaaast
  • Static sites from a CMS
  • Used a Nuxt plugin written by a colleague
    • Get all routes stored in the CMS with a custom WordPress API endpoint
    • Run this list of routes through nuxt generate
    • Every time an API request is made, create a JSON file of the response
    • When the static site makes an API request, it fetches from the static-deployed JSON file instead of the API
  • Static sites add resilience for users because the site can't really go down or get hacked easily.
  • However, it's still a new thing for agencies. Much of the build tooling, especially for our multi-site situation, was custom. This could make it more challenging to come back to later on.