Cox & Kings
Travel
Template and component library development for this luxury travel e‑commerce platform; one of the world's oldest travel companies
In Detail
At the time that it was decided that Cox & Kings required an all‑new client‑facing website, their existing website (as well as other back‑end products, back‑office software, and infrastructure) was managed by a remote development team based in India. As there was a significant amount of legacy application sharing between the website and back‑office applications, it was decided that the most straightforward way to roll out a new look and feel would be to develop a set of front‑end templates and components.
These were then integrated by the remote team (under my guidance) into their existing infrastructure. As Bootstrap and jQuery were already heavily featured within their systems, these became requisites for the new build.
Using a simple webpack environment, I developed a library of static components and templates using Storybook as a way of demonstrating each one in isolation. This also acted to offer some code‑based documentation on how the components should be used during integration.
Overall, over seventy individual components and another thirty precomposed HTML templates were all carefully aligned to offer visitors an optimised, responsive, mobile‑first interface and an easier way to book their next adventure.
Homepage
When arriving on the Cox & Kings website, the visitor is presented with a set of large, select imagery of some of the destinations they offer. From there, they can immediately start exploring holidays or get in touch. This experience is carefully optimised for mobile users, making sure that key actions are accessible immediately.
Destinations
Leaning heavily on the vibrant, bold imagery Cox & Kings are known for in their catalogues, the Destinations pages offer categorisation familiar to their print catalogues and allow users to filter holidays based on various facets, including location, time of year, cost, etc.
Interactive Pairs Game
In October 2014, a pairs‑matching game that I had 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
These pages allowed content creators to use various layouts and components to put together more editorial‑type pages ‑ familiar to their print catalogues. In this case, an entire feature was developed around holiday locations based on the month and time of year.
