Fixd Repair: A Vue-Powered Home Repair Website

2018 November - Ongoing

Goals

Redesigning the look and feel of an older WordPress website
Optimizing load times, refactoring the code base, writing clean reusable code
Utilize modern technologies such as Nuxt, Vuex, Router, and Webpack
Working effectively with a team under fast-moving business deadlines

Project Overview

Fixd Repair needs an older WordPress site updated for 2018. What’s a hot framework that certainly lives up to the hype? Vue.js to the rescue! My job was to work with a team, and fulfill my role by building out a performant front-end for the new site. Utilizing modern technologies such as Nuxt, Vuex, and Vue Router, I was able to build a scale-able front end for this fast-growing home repair company. Overall, the site is designed mobile-first, with a responsive design that works across all screen-sizes and browsers.

All assets are loaded as inline svgs, which make load times blazing fast and programmable. Here, the pins are hoverable, and the clouds animate across the map.

Using Vue.js, you can create instant form validation with multiple forms in the same session. The big advantage here is how fluid a complex form flow can feel to the end user.

Process

Getting Started

I was provided assets, mobile and desktop designs, and a general sitemap with a game plan. My job now was to bring the designs to life. When I approach a site, I usually do it page by page all the way through, then move on to the next. This made sense when approaching the redesign, so that’s how I started.

Always Working On Something

After a full page is good to go, I’ll take revisions/feedback while moving on to the next. For time crunches, it’s ideal to always be working on what you can. For example, if a page is done, there’s no need to wait for reviews to come in if you can be working on another page. Since there was a time crunch, that’s the approach I took.

..And Beyond

Page by page works for a while, but real world requirements eventually kick in. After the first few pages were built out, the process turned into changing current designs, adding new features, and optimizing the overall site as much as possible. Changes from there involve a mixture of new designs/pages and tweaks to current ones.

Technologies Used

The build

Fixd utilizes not only the bells and whistles of Vue and its single file components, but also their third party libraries such as Vuex and Vue Router. The build uses a mix of Gulp.js for deployment to AWS and Webpack for building and generating static files(Nuxt).

Styles and SCSS

SCSS compilation and auto prefixing is built in on top of the overall build, allowing a large folder structure on top of some mixed-in scope styles. This is usually how I prefer to work, since I utilize global and reusable style rules where I can.

Other Libraries

This site also utilizes smaller libraries to carry out things like API calls(axios), form validation(vee-validate), and general helper functions(_scores, vue-smooth-reflow, etc).