Overview
Connexus Health offers a range of rehabilitative services delivered by qualified health professionals. Alongside the business launch, I was part of the team developing the website, which main aims were to showcase the available treatments and provide quick & efficient ways of booking appointments.
Challenges
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- Content management & optimisation with Laravel
The nature of the project and all parties involved required the integration of a headless CMS solution that provides quick loading times and efficient content entry & asset management.
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- Enquiry submission and validation
The contact form on the site was a key component of the project deliverable, which had to cater to different customer groups, incorporate field validation support and function to a high standard on various devices.
Process
1. Headless CMS Setup
Connecting our Laravel environment with the headless CMS was achieved by using the recently introduced functionality within the platform for making HTTP requests. Retrieving data had to be accompanied by passing an authentication token, which Laravel also easily handles, as well as efficient error reporting.
2. Vue Components
In order to maintain consistency across the site, several reusable components were created by passing dynamic properties from Blade. Those Vue instances were primarily used for displaying featured treatments on the homepage, sidebar blocks with further information and sub-services assigned to the top treatment categories.
3. Form processing & validation
To avoid spam enquiries and assist users with filling out the enquiry form correctly, I incorporated two methods of front-end data validation. Adding Vuelidate to the form component guaranteed that all fields are validated before submission and that no such event will occur until any form entry errors are resolved. Additionally, by integrating Recaptcha 3.0, ingenuine enquiries are filtered out in the background without affecting the user experience.
Conclusion
Working on Connexus Health was a rewarding experience for several reasons. Utilizing Laravel was great practice for me as I learned and successfully incorporated Laravel's new HTTP request API. Also, Vue came in extremely handy for creating consistent and compact content blocks, as well as adding core functionality to the enquiry form on the site. Overall, it was an exciting opportunity to work on a new service that had just launched, as I felt the responsibility to deliver efficient solutions in various fields (design and development related), which resulted in a user-friendly and speed efficient website.
