data.world

Website redesign and CMS migration

View live
A screenshot of dataworld-homepage.jpg

Full-stack Developer

I wrote ~90% of the front-end and 100% of the back-end. The beautiful redesign was handled by my colleagues at geniant.

  • Statamic
  • Front-end
  • Data Migration
  • Vue
  • Static HTML
  • Vanilla JS

About the project

data.world is a large data catalog software service. They had a 5-year-old marketing site with ~500 pages of articles, resources, and other materials. Given a beautiful redesign, I built the entire front-end using HTML, SCSS, and some lightweight Javascript. I then integrated everything into a custom Statamic instance, automated the bulk of the migration from Wordpress, and set up a SSG pipeline for fast, secure deployments.

Custom Statamic Implementation

I was able to leverage Statamic to build a bespoke CMS impementation for data.world. The content management was organizing in a way that was easy to navigate, and mapped to their internal structure for managing granular user access rights. I built 30 fieldsets and nearly 40 templates, including an extraordinarily robust custom page builder that found a sweet spot of broad customization while ensuring every page matches the visual language of the site.

Going Old-school with Static HTML

Two of the priorities of this project were speed and security. It doesn’t get much faster than flat HTML, plus there’s nothing to hack into (sorta). So I built a Static Site Generation (SSG) pipeline that generates the entire site as flat HTML files. The CMS exists on a different server, on a different domain, and updates to the live site are deployed quickly and securely.

“But Caleb, what about search and filtering?” Well, part of the SSG process also generates optimized JSON objects with all the metadata needed for filtering and search across the entire site. I built some lightweight Vue components that injest that JSON data and filter everything directly on the front-end. Again, lightning quick and 100% secure.

From MySQL to YAML

5 years of blog posts, webinars, podcasts, resources, calculators and marketing material needed to be moved to the new site, with URLs persisting for SEO purposes. I was able to migrate all of the existing content from Wordpress’s arcane MySQL structure to Statamic’s flat-file YAML/Markdown format. There was still a good bit of cleanup that needed to be made by hand, but the process was sped-up considerably.