The SimplePart platform has gone through multiple iterations since its inception in 2011. It began as a fully custom part sales package for car dealer and OEM clients. Over the years, as client numbers and part data grew, it was necessary to create a somewhat customizable template with flexibility to adhere to each client's brand guidelines.
What started as a "template in theory" where sites were duplicated and code was overridden eventually became a wireframe taxonomy of pages and variables. This increased efficiency both in design turn-around and dev build timelines.
The Before
- Sites had same basic page and flow layout, but many components were customized per client requests, thus limiting the scaleability of site updates at a platform level.
- Many hardcoded customizations turned into bugs as the platform adapted to new UX/UI versions and manual overrides were common, further complicating any new updates.
- Because of many overrides, code grew messier and messier, leading to more bug instances and greater QA effort to find and Dev effort to fix.
The After
- All components were tied to new custom variables that could be set so 90% of the front-end styling could be done in a matter of minutes.
- Components set up in a design/dev library so that each variable styling could be easily accessed without extra work on either design or development teams.
- The newly created site template is now the starting point for all sites and carries no baggage from previous sites, minimizing confusion and inefficient back-and-forth between design and development.
The building of the Reference Template was admittedly long overdue. However once created and implemented, the timeline to stand up new sites and update current sites drastically decreased.
All Projects
