FAIRWINDS Website

Creating the new fairwinds.org was a true passion project of mine that I had started nearly day one of working at FAIRWINDS.

Our old site had been built on a relatively unknown php-based Content Management System (CMS) called ModX that, to be frank, was in pretty rough shape. There was no way to back up code, it was difficult for anyone to understand how to use it (including myself), and the majority of the operation was based on institutional knowledge that was centralized in the mind of the one other developer on staff.

I did not like our site and I knew it could be better. Safer. Modern.

So I started on a project that I had codenamed "Polaris" and spent the next 6 months or so trying to convince everyone from my boss to IT to the CEO of the company that there was a way for us to not only modernize our tech stack, but change how we sell online.

I needed to convince the company on two fronts:

In one corner I was asking a very reserved company to take a massive risk on my plan for a technology stack. This wasn't just a question of purchasing a new CMS — this was moving them from physical servers hosted onsite (and in Tampa) on a stack they had used for decades to an edge network built on a Jamstack approach using a programming language (REACT) that even I, myself, didn't yet know.

While all of that was great, I also knew I had to convince our executives that had no clue to what any of that meant and probably couldn't care less about what GitHub and a headless CMS was. Form them, I had to explain how the investment would ultimately lead to a multi phased strategy — starting with a foundational overhaul of technology, sure, but ending with a site that will learn a user's interest and viewing habits in order to tailor itself to the user and lead to higher conversions.

I had decided to focus on a few guiding principles in my overall web strategy:

Be Safe, Flexible, and Future Forward

We needed to focus on technology that offered us a stronger foundation and wouldn't rely on institutional knowledge. A core belief I carried into the project is the site needs to work smoothly even if I disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow. So, we would only use tools, frameworks, and programming languages that had a large community behind it. It couldn't just be shiny — it had to be safe and supported.

Keep it Simple, Stupid

The site had been stagnant and overgrown with metaphorical weeds. Pages would sometime exist just to give a user a single paragraph of test just to force them to click through to the information they originally requested. We needed streamline everything and be willing to cut out anything that didn't absolutely need to exist.

Put Our Users First...Always

People aren't interested in content that comes off as self-serving. From design to the content on the page, we have to create something that was easy to understand and served their needs before our own. We needed to focus more on financial education articles, for example, because people are more likely to come to your site to understand how they could make better financial decisions than to find out what the APR is on our mortgage loans.

Convincing a multi-billion dollar company to take a massive risk was thing — having to figure out how to do it (on my own) was another.

You see, while I knew this specific technology stack was the right move for us, I had no experience with most of it. My background was as a PHP developer, and while I had tried at my last job to learn REACT in the past, I never really got my head around it.

Now I had to lead a massive project while at the same time teaching myself how everything works. The only other developer on staff was hesitant to the change and, even if, was going to be focused on maintaining the current site while I built the new one. I was going to be the lead developer and project manger.

In the end, this trial-by-fire lead me to be a better developer. Unlike my attempts in the past, everything started to click and I had finally understood what all of the hype was about. The site was faster, cleaner, and most of what I hoped for and I finally felt I had caught up to others in my field.