Generation Life Website
I had the privilege of working with a great client based in Melbourne, Victoria in Australia. Originally known as "Austock", they changed their company name to "Generation Life". Their business has a number of different investment products for families and individuals or all ages.
We were lucky enough to fly over to Melbourne and spend a week with the client to understand the nature of the project and work out all the details.
Technology
The Generation Life website leverages of ApostropheCMS, I started looking into this platform after working on the South African Tourism Website because I wasn't convinced Umbraco was a great CMS. In fact, I think Umbraco was a terrible choice as a CMS for South African Tourism but unfortunately I worked on that large web platform well after that decision was made.
ApostropheCMS showcased some great "out the box" features that the South African Tourism website desperately needed and I saw a benefit to using it on other projects. I presented ApostropheCMS as an alternative to .NET solutions because our internal direction shifted to open source technologies, leveraging off Javascript platforms. Most importantly the features we needed were officially produced by the ApostropheCMS team, this spoke to the development of these extensions been done in accordance with the design patterns applicable to ApostropheCMS.
I went in with the idea we'd use ApostropheCMS and Generation Life liked the approach.
ApostropheCMS implements the following technology:
- Node.js
- MongoDB
- Nunjucks templating engine
- jQuery
I also leverage off cloud hosting for this solution:
- Azure App Service for application hosting via a Docker container
- Azure Application Insights for tracking and app service alerts abd performance
- Azure Storage as a media store
- MongoDB Cloud Atlas for the database solution
Results
Their investments under management extended just over AUS$600 million. Three years later and their investments under management have doubled to AUS$1,3 billion. I've been fortunate to be instrumental in helping this company grow in a digital space, providing a solid web platform which has extended to allow a multitude of services and products for their clients.
Responsibilities
- Client facing engagement
- Technology selection
- Development team selection and management
- Technical direction