Sterling Capital
Check it out >- design
- development
- wordpress
A friend of mine posted on Linkedin asking if there were any freelance front end folks looking for some contract work. I responded and we got to work on building a new front end for sterlingbrokers.com. They had just worked on a new brand effort, but didn‘t really have much in the way of design or design sytem resources. So they needed someone that had design system knowledge that could try to make sense of what to build and someone that could piece together a decent looking site, backed by a CMS in a short period of time.
They ended up choosing Wordpress as the CMS of choice for pricing reasons. It was a small team and the pricing options for something Contentful for business was too much. WP Engine pricing fit the bill, so we went with that. I‘m hopeful that I‘m not alone in hating the Wordpress blocks editor for pages, but I don‘t think its a great idea to not have structured content on your marketing site and let the content editor folks also drag elements around the page visually too. That‘s a recipe for an accessibility and usability nightmare. So we used the trusty classic editor (who remembers Advanced Custom Fields??), and I fired up the Wordpress API (shudder) and did a headless site multi-page static site on top.
In the end everything works great, but I developed a new hatred for Wordpress‘ default REST API. Man that thing is not well organized or implemented. I‘m sure people swear by it and its trusted and battle-tested and all that, but you just can‘t get from it all the things a modern site needs. I built a decently complex “section builder” implementation in ACF so that the content folks could have some content/layout control but didn‘t get the full drag and drop do-whatever control. So each page has an ACF section in the CMS that lets the creator select which kind of section they want to create, and each section has structure content and options/fields that control it. Pretty cool and fun to build, but would have been WAY better if the classic Wordpress editor wasnt‘t so…incredibly…dated and ugly.