Website for ALC

Introduction

During an internship of 7 weeks in summer 2016, my main objective was to design, build, and launch the website of Avocat Loire Conseil, a French law practice. Although I had a little experience thank to a school project, it was my first professional experience in this field, and it had to be perfect. This is what makes this article interesting in my opinion.

Specifications

These are the important specifications I had to work with:

• The website must be very lightweight, and responsive for mobile usage.
• It must be accessible for eye impaired users, users with an outdated browser and users with Javascript disabled.
• It must be SEO.
• It should be coherent with the feel of the office.
• Last but not least, it must be nice to use!

Technologies

To build this website, I used several technologies, and even build my own tool. I will now be describing them.

Frameworks

I used:

• Bootstrap 3. A logical choice as it gives the easiest way to create a responsive website. Foundation could have been a nice alternative, but I prefer the components that Bootstrap includes. I did not start with a template to avoid having too much resemblance with existing websites.
• Pushy, a nice side menu that I highly advise, built with CSS and JS, meaning you have to provide a way for mobile users with JS disabled to use your website.
• Font Awesome.
• jQuery.

API

I also used two Google APIs :

• Google Maps API: this is a convenient way to create an interactive map on a website. It is not lightweight but it is customizable, and more importantly, people are used to it.
• Google ReCaptcha: putting an email address on a website is a huge issue. Crawler robots indeed look for email to spam in every website they find. Even though anti-spam software are getting better and better, I wanted to avoid that. This is why I used this API to hide the address from those robots.

Result

The website is currently online, hosted by OVH, and can be seen at this address : www.alc-avocats.fr (in French).