Flagship Website Redesign

At Lion Interactive, I was the primary developer for Academy of Art University's main website. It was a big project—serving thousands of students, faculty, and prospective students across all their degree programs.

The Challenge

Academy of Art needed a complete website overhaul. They had dozens of degree programs to showcase, academic calendar information to present, and prospective students to engage. The site needed to handle all that complexity while still being manageable for their internal team.

My Role

I developed most of the front-end components and configured the WordPress CMS settings across the site. I also coordinated work among several developers on our team, making sure everyone's code stayed consistent as we all worked on different sections.

My main responsibility was leading the integration between their internal systems and WordPress. I worked with their team to to build a synchronization system using their REST API. This automated pipeline pulled course academic calendar data directly into WordPress.

On the technical side, I built out a library of reusable components that worked across all device sizes, and designed CSS animations that enhanced the user experience without killing performance. I also set up a flexible CMS architecture so non-technical staff could manage the complex content themselves.

Throughout the project, I stayed in regular contact with Academy of Art's stakeholders to make sure the site worked for everyone—prospective high school students, current graduate students, faculty, all of them. As we got closer to launch, I documented everything and trained their internal team so they could confidently take over maintenance.

The Result

After launch, Academy of Art's development team took over ongoing maintenance and enhancements. The architecture we built gave them a solid foundation they could adapt to their needs while keeping the original design intact.