Disney Cruise Relaunch (2009)
Media
What it Was
A long-term project, redesigning and rewriting the marketing and commerce sites for Disney Cruise Line. There was a concentrated effort to bring the brand and site in-line with the recently redesigned Walt Disney World site, both in look & feel and in the technologies used.
What I Did
I was brought in to help improve performance on the site. This involved re-architecting the site's handling of media and the build process to accomodate for horizontal scaling of web servers, live version upgrades, hotfixes, and rollbacks. To reduce network bottlenecks, I wrote a Java Servlet to create dynamic, versioned JavaScript & CSS resource bundles.
Finally, I also rewrote the site's faceted search implementation to be a much more responsive, and fluid experience by eliminating nearly all network traffic on the front-end.
Why You Should Care
The site's updated media strategy and build process spread to other sites and became the new standard for all new sites.
The drastic improvements shown on the faceted search also helped set a precedent for focusing on front-end performance optimizations.