« IKEA North America

Templating system

We built and hosted many microsites for IKEA North America, including some limited-time sweepstakes and special offer sites, as well as portions of the corporate site. My role in all was as lead front-end developer, responsible for markup, CSS, javascript (form validation, etc.). Most of these sites were commissioned to appear as part of the main corporate site, including the standard header/footer chrome.

It soon became apparent that whenever the client required updates in the site chrome, each site would have to be manually fixed and pushed live. The solution was a master page templating container, set up as a separate site. It wraps around content (using virtual directories) in several microsites.

We can now maintain page chrome (which mirrors client's corporate site) separately from content, and update across subdomains effortlessly. Eliminating all that code that used to be duplicated across sites has dramatically decreased the maintenance burden. Before I set this up, each site we built that was supposed to resemble an IKEA site had to be updated separately.

Role:

Lead front-end developer, web site and email campaigns

Skills/tools used:

CMS built using nested .NET master pages, jquery

URL

http://info.ikea-usa.com/StoreLocator/StoreLocator.aspx