Irvine Spectrum Center
As lead developer of this website for a popular Southern California shopping and entertainment destination, I built the site on Umbraco CMS with vanilla JavaScript on the frontend, which contributed to excellent page speed scores. The site is fully responsive. Key aspects of the build:
- Developed a store directory with multi-dimensional filtering (by category, cuisine type, and features like curbside pickup or outdoor seating), keyword search, and a grid/list view toggle, all using vanilla JavaScript.
- Built a mega-menu navigation system organized around the center’s main sections: Dining, Shopping, Entertainment, and Visit. The navigation is fully editable in the CMS.
- Created event and promotion listing pages with filterable card grids, supporting date ranges, venue filtering, and featured event highlighting.
- Architected all content in the Umbraco CMS so that editors have full control over pages, store listings, events, dining categories, and entertainment features without developer involvement.
- Built structured store detail pages with a more rigid CMS schema, allowing editors to enter store info like phone, suite, services, categories, and photo galleries in a consistent format, while most other pages on the site use a more freeform content approach.
- Built a custom CMS-driven map system for store detail pages. Rather than using Google Maps, the client uploads an image of the center map and specifies the coordinates of its corners in the CMS. Map pins are then automatically composited on top using CSS positioning. An interactive center-wide map page was also built with store polygon overlays.
- Integrated a weather API to display live temperature and hours in the site header.
- Integrated an Instagram feed on the homepage, pulling in and displaying posts from the center’s account.
