Post preview: about us

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Next up: the about us page for Bass Pro Shops. It’s short and sweet, but my hand hurts today and I don’t want to overdo it with typing. Plus I have homework (when don’t I?).

Mini cart and mini account – Bass Pro Shops

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In 2011, Bass Pro Shops had a cart that was called a “windowshade” which basically dropped down from the top of the screen, then pulled back up when you clicked close. From both a development standpoint and a user experience standpoint, this was a nightmare. No one really enjoyed this feature, but of course you can’t change a large website quickly so it took a few years to change things up. This feature was live from 2011 until 2013.

Store Map – Bass Pro Shops

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When I was hired as by Bass Pro Shops as a web developer in 2010, one of my first assignments (before the size guides redesign) was to redesign the store map or the store locator. This map showed current Bass Pro Shops stores around the United States and Canada with basic contact information and a link to their respective store pages with much more information, as well as showing the locations where future stores would be located. The old store map was dated and hadn’t been updated with the website redesign in 2009, and was an entirely manual process to update the map information every time something changed. The needs were deceptively simple: make the new map larger to fit our new website format (before responsive design kids!), update the design to match the new branding, and integrate it into our homegrown backend CMS for easier updating.

Trello and networking and fangirls

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So I’m terrible at networking. I’m a bit bad at socializing (probably on the autism spectrum, but who isn’t these days?) I love Trello (which is probably pretty damned apparent) and as much as I hate terms like “dream job,” it truly is. They are a distributed (remote) team that’s working on a fantastic web application that millions of people use daily. They have an excellent grasp of usability and user experience, and their development team is very active and open to the community, while not being open source. I’ve been a fan of Joel Spolsky since he launched Stack Overflow with Jeff Atwood (another fantastic programmer) back in 2008, although I’d been hearing about him since about 2002, when I was first exposed to FogBugz.

CSS Eclipse, AKA ECSS-lipse

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I saw this animation on Dribbble and I fell in love with it, so of course I had to remake it in CSS. I still need to do the spark animation when the eclipse is total (well, it’s not total, it’s an annular solar eclipse actually). When I was doing it, I couldn’t figure out an elegant way to have the spark come around and paint the border the way it does in the animation, at least not with CSS. I’m still working on my animation chops here, okay? If I had realized how vital animation would be to my future career, I would have taken more animation classes when I did sound. Yeah, that degree’s totally working out for me these days…

Enjoy!

See the Pen Annular solar eclipse in CSS by Smokie Lee (@xtoq) on CodePen.