In June 2018, I led the front-end development for a complete overhaul of GameInformer.com, partnering with my engineering team to execute a major visual redesign alongside a full CMS migration.
To modernize the legacy infrastructure, I developed a custom Drupal theme to power a fully responsive front-end system and assisted with backend configuration management. The redesign introduced dynamic layout features, including high-impact hero media slots for full-bleed images, videos, and galleries, as well as a customizable homepage section that gave editors flexible control over featuring key content. Later, I expanded the site's capabilities by engineering a custom Drupal module and CSS updates to introduce a site-wide dark mode feature for readers.
The site has since undergone many updates, but an archived version of this site at the time it launched can be viewed via the Wayback machine.
Site Features
Landing Pages
For the home page and all landing pages, the editorial team needed the ability to choose posts or videos to feature at the top of each page, above feeds showing the most recent articles. We added this option using entity reference fields, Drupal Views, and JavaScript.
The homepage was customized to include several sidebars with popular articles and videos each week, allow for ad placements, and an area for a poll to be placed to increase user engagement. Landing pages for reviews and previews allowed users to sort by platform to quickly find articles that were relevant to their interests.
Articles and Products
On some articles, information about the game discussed was featured at the top of each page, including information like publisher, developer, rating, platforms, and release date(s). This information was stored in special pages for each product so it could be easily maintained without updating multiple posts. The product pages also displayed a collection of all articles about that product for users to easily find other posts about something they were interested in.
Dark Mode Update
Based on user requests, I added a new dark mode theme to GameInformer.com in April 2019. This version changed the theme of the website to display light text on a dark background and allowed users to set theme options in their profile.
I created the alternate CSS styles and other theme files required for the dark mode theme, added administrative settings to assist with managing these options, and implemented tools to monitor user settings.
