At Fi, we were commissioned to design and develop the front-end of EA.com. As a technical lead, my main responsibility was to head up a team of developers from the pitch process, all the way through launch. My goals for the project where to establish code standards, maintain a high level of code quality, and ensure a smooth hand-off of well developed and well documented code to EA developers.
A portion of the project involved developing quick and efficient prototyping concepts for approval by design and marketing executives. The prototype phase helped cut down development costs by helping EA determine which features where cost effective and would yield the greatest return on investment.
The site features a CSS theme framework that allows each page to have a distinct look and feel appropriate for a particular gaming franchise. Buttons, headers, logos and background images can all be handled on a page level to allow for maximum flexibility.
For this project, all Javascript functionality was broken out into jQuery plugins. This allowed us to centralize Javascript functionality and write highly re-usable code. Developing functionality as jQuery plugins also allowed us to code to a standard that is well documented and well maintained by the jQuery organization. This means that developers new to the project could get up to speed quickly with the vast amount of jQuery documentation available on the web.
