Kinja Custom Header Case Study
"All of the sites look the same", had been a consistent refrain that the product team has heard from both the editorial staff and readers throughout the life of Kinja, and only intensified when the brands of Onion, Inc. migrated on to the platform.
With that in mind, we set about creating a new way for the different sites to be able to express their own unique and creative brand identities without having to rely on time from the product team. The ability to completely customize headers on any different category, story type, vertical (sub-site) page is available from within Kinja's internal management UI, which all site editors have access to.
Some great examples of the editorial staff taking full advantage of the project can be found on the Gizmodo sub-sites like Paleofuture, io9, & Earther; and the various sections of The A.V. Club: Film, T.V., Music, Games, & AUX.
I was singularly responsible for defining, overseeing, and implementing all the technical aspects of this product including:
- Designing an iterative and incremental development plan for the project
- Defining the API endpoint schema
- Creating robust documentation for use by staff across all parts of the business
Feel free to explore the code, or play around with it in StoryBook
