Webveloper
No-code website editor · frontend engineer on a large distributed team · 2019 to 2021
A no-code website editor for small businesses like a restaurant, a dentist or a gym. I was a frontend engineer on a large distributed team, and I built the screens business owners used to edit their site sections.
- The problem
- A small business needs a website and cannot write a line of code.
- What I did
- I built the editor screens for Location and products, and the media library.
- The result
- A no-code website editor small businesses used to launch their own sites.
A small business needs a website and cannot write a line of code
A restaurant, a dentist or a gym needs a real website, and none of them will open a code editor to get one. The product asked the business questions about itself, its colors, its hours, its location, its prices, its photos, and turned the answers into a finished site. From then on the owner edited that site in the browser, adding sections from a menu of predefined ones, and never touched a file.
I built the screens owners used to edit their sites
I built the editing screens for Location and physical products, plus the media library that let owners reuse uploaded images across their sites. I worked within the existing platform architecture. These are three decisions I made in that work.
I built the editor screens for Location and products.
Each generated site was stored as one settings file: pages, and each page a list of sections. Every section a business could add needed a screen to fill it in. I built the Location screen for addresses and contact details, and the physical products screen for names, prices, photos and descriptions. The opening-hours popup beside it and the public rendering of both were colleagues' work.
The media library I built made every image reusable.
Before it existed, a picture effectively belonged to the spot it was uploaded into, so a business re-uploaded the same logo for the header, the gallery and a product card. I built the library screen: the one place where a business picks an image it already uploaded and reuses it anywhere on its site. The stored settings file never held picture links, only short codes resolved into real images further down the line. The upload plumbing underneath was mostly a colleague's.
I shipped each section with its edge cases handled.
Editor screens need to handle the content people actually enter. The Location section broke when a business left its service area blank. The address autocomplete failed for certain states. A product video would not play. A long word in a section title broke its layout. I went back after launch and fixed the specific ways real content broke these screens, and from then on the empty state, the overlong text and the missing field shipped with the section.
What I built inside the editor
The editor shipped and let non-technical owners run their own sites, with more than forty real business websites built and deployed from it. My contribution was the Location and physical products editing screens, plus the media library for reusing uploaded images. The challenge was adding sections to a live product while keeping existing customer sites working.
I can add to a live product that real customers already depend on without breaking what is there, and then fix what real content does to it once it ships.