Windsor Great Park

About Windsor Great Park

Windsor Great Park is an area of Royal history spanning over 1,000 years, including - historical monuments, ancient forests and stunning horticultural displays, as well as rare wildlife, plants and fungi.

Project Requirements

While working at RHP I was lucky enough to work on a new website build for Windsor Great Park, redesigning their existing site and moving it over to the Umbraco CSM. This complete overhaul would allow them to easily manage content on the site. Ideally they would simply push out news and information changes as they happen on the park.

The Solution

The site for Windsor Great Park was starting to look quite dated. This refresh allowed us to bring the design up to a more modern standard and add in more modular functionality. Key pieces of park information, such as news and events, had to clearly stand out so any visitor would be up to date with the latest information before their visit.

Roles & Responsibilities

On this project I worked on converting the designs into working HTML with another frontend developer. All the components in the design were implemented as components, allowing them to be used anywhere. By introducing this reuse-ability it would be easy for the client to change the way pages displayed with little to no technical support.

To create this monster project we first built out the components as HTML/CSS completely standalone to the Umbraco CMS. This allowed us to focus on each individual module and make quick updates if the client wasn’t happy with the design. Once everything was signed off the development team took the HTML and integrated it with the content being fed through Umbraco. We were then able to go through and tidy up any small issues where Umbraco didn’t play nice with the frontend to create a polished end result.

We also had to focus on providing an accessible website as a wide variety of people would be the target audience. During the build stage we also had to keep in mind the responsive functionality. These days it should go without saying the site needs to be responsive, however there were a lot of custom JavaScript widgets that needed to scale gracefully. These all had to have special care and attention given to them in order to make the project a success.

This was a really fun project to work on and I loved the way the different components came together to create such a great user experience.

Key tasks

My tasks on this project were:

• Break up the designs and build modular components
• Umbraco CMS integration
• Valid HTML, CSS and jQuery