FullHealth Children's Charity Web Developer
June 2013 - September 2013
My personal Hello World!
My first ever real work for a website! FullHealth.ca is a static website written in HTML, CSS, PHP and jQuery/Javascript for front-end web development. In high school, I had never taken any programming or computer science courses, but out of curiosity I was self-learning web development using Codecademy in my spare time. When summer break rolled around after final exams in Grade 11, I thought to apply the knowledge that I had been building up throughout the year and put them to the test. I got in contact with Mike Gorev, CTO and Co-Founder of FullHealth Children's Charity, which at the time had just about started up and I got to working on the website not long after.
What was interesting for me about this work was that I had been dropped right into the middle of it; I didn't get to build it from the ground up, and so I had to familiarize myself with what was already built and build on top of that. It was my first time using an FTP client, and also my first time developing for older web browsers, as charities want to be highly accessible.
Since all the pages are written in PHP, it would be impossible for me to do extensive testing of the website locally/offline as PHP is executed server-side. If one were to try opening .php files locally on their web browsers, it would simply be a plain-text display of all the site's code. The solution to this lies in a subfolder of the website titled "V2", where anyone working on something can push changes to the V2 folder and view the changes online. In fact, anyone could easily take a look at what was to come for the website by visiting it themselves. This trial and error style was very interesting as classically pushing and pulling changes via FTP was quite cumbersome.
On this testing environment version of the site, I wrote every contribution made to the main site, and also changes to the site that have not been implemented yet, such as a dropdown menu written from scratch. FullHealth Children's Charity's relatively small size is reflected in the site's content; since there aren't even that many pages for the website, the main site does not yet warrant the need for a dropdown menu. However, as the charity grows in the future, there will be a need for one, so until then the dropdown menu that I made will lie dormant until the right time comes.
Working with Mike was mainly done through texting or e-mail, and while FTP clients are limited by people taking turns making changes, it wasn't a limitation that was felt as we at no point were changing things at the same time. Most of the communication consisted of discussions about working around problems with Internet Explorer and how it interprets code, the most notable issue I faced being the notoriously different way Internet Explorer behaves with z-index, resulting in layering issues such as content appearing behind other site elements when they should be in the foreground. With every change that I made in the V2 testing environment, I had to check with every popular web browser to see if the site didn't suddenly break. At the time, I was testing the website with a Macbook with Safari and with every other browser on my Windows desktop to see that nothing had gone wrong as I was making changes to the front-end.
Contributions
- Fixed position donation bar
- Dropdown menu from scratch (not implemented on main site)
- Maintaining backwards compatability with web browsers as old as Internet Explorer 6 as changes are made
- Fixed indexing bug that only occurred on Internet Explorer causing content to appear behind the background
Project Tools
- Notepad (no really)
- FileZilla
- Google Chrome
- Internet Explorer
- Mozilla Firefox
- Safari