Alysha Jo Nolan

One of my early projects involved converting a ThemeFisher template to Hugo, fully optimized for use in CloudCannon.

Key features of the template include:

• Dynamic Contact Form and Components: Interactive, user-friendly features that improve engagement.

• Blog with Pagination and Category Pages: Organizes content for seamless browsing and improved user experience.

• Configurable Navigation and Footer: Easily adjustable to meet changing content needs.

• CloudCannon Optimization: Structured for smooth, editor-friendly content management.

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Ready: Built with configurable SEO settings for better visibility.

• Pagefind-Powered Search: Enables fast, on-site search functionality.

As part of a collaborative team project, I contributed to building a polished marketing website template in Eleventy, based on a Figma design.

Our process involved thoughtful discussions to ensure the template’s flexibility and quality. Each change was thoroughly reviewed by two team members, resulting in a highly refined final product.

Some of the key features I worked on include:

• Flexible Two-Column Component: A customizable left-right layout with reorder capability.

• Configurable SEO Settings: Built-in options for enhancing search visibility.

• Image Gallery Component: A gallery to display images relevant to the users business.

• Embed Component: Easy embedding of external content like Google Docs and Hubspot forms.

• Custom Form Builder: Comprehensive form solution with multiple input types and robust validation.

The brief for this project was to create a modern search interface for the PaperCut website using Algolia.

Opting for Algolia’s custom API added complexity but provided a more flexible and powerful solution. I served as the lead developer throughout, managing each stage from index creation to the final search interface.

Key steps included:

1. Index Creation in Hugo: Developed a custom output format to generate the Algolia index.
2. Efficient Data Synchronization with Algolia: Streamlined updates by sending only changes (additions, updates, deletions) to improve performance.
3. Interface Development from Figma: Built an intuitive search interface following detailed design specifications.
4. Dynamic Search Results with JavaScript: Integrated Algolia’s API to dynamically populate search results.

I developed this site from scratch as a personal project to store and organize recipes, with plans to expand it into a full meal-planning tool.

The concept was inspired by the feel of a handwritten recipe book - like a collection passed down through generations.