Institute for Justice

The Institute for Justice needed to update their 10-year-old website built with WordPress classic. They needed to make their site more organized and easy to navigate for a wide range of company departments and special projects. Since the website is the primary tool they use for fundraising, it had numerous stakeholders with sometimes conflicting requirements.

I was the project manager and lead developer for this website. I was responsible for initially evaluating the existing site’s existing structure and developing the proposal leading my employer to winning the contract.

The site required a big migration of the former site’s content and standardization of content, media files, and metadata. As the primary developer, I was tasked with creating numerous custom Gutenberg blocks, incorporating legacy shortcodes, creating relational ACF fields all while moving the project along to meet an immovable deadline.

Technologies used include

Noteworthy Features

• Custom Gutenberg mapping block that allows site administrators to create a custom color-coded map of the US, assigning any custom colors to any states along with optional map key information.
• Hero images can have facial focal area assigned that uses JS to calculate image dimensions and avoids a person’s face from getting cropped when browser is resized.
• Numerous pages in the special reports using JSON to dynamically display and sort data-driven information in tables and graphs
• Integration of both externally hosted podcasts as well as streaming media hosted on the web server
• High-res images are available for news agencies writing articles on cases via a modal pop-up in the media resources section for individual cases.
• All website images and media files stored on AWS
• Online donations with payment processing handled by Stripe, Paypal, or eCheck