My second big task as an employee of SystemSoft Technologies (“SSTech”) was to join the team redesigning the corporate website. Half of it was based upon Adobe XD mockups and another half was improvised while matching the same design language as the content began to inflate from the initial specs.
Some of the biggest technological hurdles were the numerous custom post types with shared categories, live searchable via an AJAX-powered page, custom keyframes animation from element to element on specialty pages, an events calendar, responsive video carousels with lightbox style players, and a contact us page featuring all of the office locations as pins on a map. Updating the pushpins was done via a remotely-read JSON file containing the office information and simple X,Y coordinate systems that would be calculated responsively and then overlaid above the static background image.
Another major feature was careers integration with both JazzHR and Bullhorn Staffing, two job posting services that SSTech used. One was used for internal positions and the other was for contract hires. Parallel job search features were implemented reusing the same templates for both feeds so that they would behave nearly identically to the end user despite coming from two different providers. The job application process would also submit the applicant’s information into their respective dashboard so that the recruiter could manage the job seekers the same way as if they had applied by other means such as job boards.
Several behind-the-scenes technologies were implemented for GDPR compliance cookie policies and visitor tracking, Microsoft 360 integrations, custom HubSpot marketing landing pages, and granular custom search results across their post types powered by SearchWP. Non-static content pages were also built using either ACF with reusable blocks or the Gutenberg block editor with some custom-styled blocks.
Initially, the website also included a custom mega menu styled navigation bubble with drill-down categories and helper text. However, once the marketing team began stuffing the website with content much of the mega menu was found to be too constraining and busy as the company shifted focuses and went after different niches. As of this writing, only two sections of the menu continue to use the custom mega menu implementation, which used a custom ACF field to turn on or off menu classes that would change the DOM output if enabled.
