Cox & Kings
Travel
Front‑end development for Cox & Kings' luxury travel e‑commerce rebuild, translating user‑tested designs into a responsive, mobile‑first experience across destination discovery, itineraries, and booking.
In Detail
Cox & Kings' website sat within a wider legacy estate that shared application code and infrastructure with back‑end products and back‑office software. Replacing the entire platform was therefore impractical; the new customer experience had to integrate cleanly with what already existed.
The rebuild was delivered as a new front‑end template and component system designed to slot into that estate. Bootstrap and jQuery were already deeply embedded across the client's systems, so the challenge was to modernise the experience without assuming a clean‑slate technology stack.
I developed the components and static templates using a lightweight webpack setup, with Storybook used to demonstrate each component independently and provide code‑based documentation for the offshore integration team.
The resulting library contained more than 70 reusable components and 30 precomposed HTML templates, covering responsive, mobile‑first journeys for discovering destinations, exploring itineraries, and beginning the booking process.
Homepage
The homepage templates prioritised large destination imagery, immediate holiday exploration, and clear contact routes. The layout was adapted for mobile users so key actions remained available without relying on the desktop experience.
Destinations
The destination templates brought Cox & Kings' catalogue‑style presentation into a responsive web interface, combining large imagery with filters for location, time of year, cost, and other trip‑planning criteria.
Interactive Pairs Game
In October 2014, a responsive pairs‑matching game I developed was published on the Cox & Kings homepage as part of a competition. This was a fully responsive JavaScript game using simple HTML and CSS animations. It featured a timer, turn counter, and cheat detection.
The competition ran for six weeks, during which the game was played over a million times.
Editorial Pages
The template system also supported editorial travel content, giving content creators reusable layouts for more magazine‑style pages. One example was a seasonal travel feature built around destinations by month and time of year.
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John Kavanagh is a real pleasure to work with, incredibly fast and has a great attention for detail. He has helped me out on numerous web projects with no effort at all. I would highly recommend him."
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Great working with John Kavanagh, on a couple of websites now. He writes some very nice clean html/css/js to deliver the design as code that was easy to hook into the cms and programming code. Very quick and nice guy to work with, so you can rely on good code being passed your way."
