The Story

Back in March 2017, Mario got in touch with me and asked me to take over the Zelaya New York website project. It was originally developed by another team but unfortunately Mario wasn’t really satisfied with the work done and wanted to start over. This was also a good chance to check whether we could partner up in future projects since we hadn’t work together before.

Working on the project

Mario gave me the choice to either rebuild the website using the existing code as a base or do everything from scratch. I went with the latter option because the existing code had quite a few QA issues (over 40+ registered on their issue tracker if I recall correctly which is one of the reasons why Mario wanted to start over) so I figured it was better to start with a clean slate, a decision that paid off as you’ll see later on.

The project consisted of a one-page website that showcased Zelaya’s bespoke shoe manufacturing process. The site featured a shoe gallery that the visitor could click on to access Zelaya’s Shoe Customizer, a tool previously built by Mario’s in-house development team that allows customers to personalize their shoes online.

Gutenberg wasn’t still a thing back when the project was being developed so I made use of the tools / APIs WordPress had to offer at the time (Custom Post Types, Custom Administration Menus, Navigation Menus, Custom Fields, etc) in order to provide user interfaces Mario and his team could use to manage the contents of the one-page website easily and without having to make changes to the code.

As a result of this collaboration, once the project was over Mario asked me to join the Majestic team as a Technical Lead – a position I held until November 2017.