InsiderPro

Screenshot of the top of IDG's InsiderPro homepage

Project: InsiderPro

Date: August 2019

Involvement: I was the principal front-end developer on this project, as part of my role as a senior front-end developer at IDG. UX team member James Kocik designed the comp, according to the requirements of Mark Lewis, manager of IDG’s Insider products. As this was a clone of an existing site, minimal back-end work was required.

Description: InsiderPro is IDG’s first paid subscription site, and its design is modeled after other sites in IDG’s portfolio, i.e. CIO. Therefore most of my work was “theming” — adjusting the site styles on top of the base HTML that all such sites use.

The article gating, subscription offer, and login/account management functionality were implemented using third-party Piano’s Composer, VX, and ID tools, with some extra custom JavaScript on our end. The goal of total experience was to encourage users to sign up for a subscription plan, and to only allow them to read full articles if they had subscribed. The Piano experiences were piped into our site via iframes, and thus I also needed to work in Piano’s web interface in order to bring the HTML/CSS into line with InsiderPro’s branding.

Technologies: Front-end: HTML, CSS (including Flexbox), JavaScript, JQuery. Back-end: Java, JSP, Struts, running our custom in-house CMS. Third party: Piano’s Composer, VX, and ID tools.

Status: I no longer maintain this, but the site is still live and using the same design and code.