Project Freedom Health
in category Projects -> Web Development -> Project Freedom Health. Updated at Mon, 03 Mar 2025 08:32:43 EST
Drupal design and migration for Freedom Health in Tampa.
Freedom Health is a subsidiary of Anthem Inc, with corporate offices located in Tampa, Fl. I worked here as a Web UI Analyst, full stack Drupal and PHP developer. I spent about 2.5 years on this ongoing Drupal project. Within that span of time, I did the conversion from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 (re-coding the entire front end from the Drupal 7 php templates to Drupal 8 twig templates), at least several Drupal version migrations in between, and then readying the Drupal 9 version of the site which waited until Freedom Health was ready to push it out.
This website, when I first began work on it in 2018, existed as a Drupal 7 build with numerous issues. It looked nothing like it looks today. Though things ‘mostly worked’ it was coded quite badly, ugly and difficult to use. One main issue was the lack of a mobile view. My first task was to cleanup and redo the html and css throughout the original Drupal 7 site and address hundreds of open tickets concerning bad coding that failed the QA scans.
Below is a screenshot of the redesigned website when I left this position in January of 2021. Since then, the state of this website has been altered somewhat. I was responsible for 100% of this public facing Drupal web project. I did all of the redesign and coding for this website, front-end and back-end, all of the Drupal configuration and views, all of the (mssql) database migrations and optimizations, all of the IIS server configuration and related security to run the website optimally and also the SEO and Google Analytics. I also did a lot of custom php scripting at this job for other things within their intranet.
I created this Florida image map with Photoshop and added javascript info pop-ups.
I used ECMAScript 2018 to create the javascript OTC catalog.
I also did 100% of the Drupal work (and migrations) at the 2 companion sites, youroptimumhealthcare.com and americasfirstchoice.com, both of which are (were) pretty much just replicas of freedomhealth.com but serving different areas and categories of Medicare Advantage plans. Americasfirstchoice.com no longer exists, they stopped doing business in South Carolina for reasons unbeknownst to me.
I left this website in pristine condition in 2021. It was fully WCAG2 compliant. Since then however, a good amount of functionality has been lost or damaged. The accessibility 'Skip to Main Content' link no longer exists. The mobile menu has been changed and is difficult to use at small sizes. Page width at small sizes is scrolling horizontally and the top carousel images are no longer aligned properly to the slider. To be clear, these errors are caused by whoever replaced me. I would never permit this code to be published in this condition.
Not a good look for a mobile view. The carousel image is misplaced. The hamburger toggler for the mobile menu is in a strange location. Even the zip code search button is the wrong size. I designed the zip code search (and everything at this site) and the css was perfect at all sizes.
The mobile menu is now almost unusable with a cell phone. This is not the pretty mobile menu I originally designed for Freedom Health.
There are numerous errors displayed at console.
And this is just what I find on the front page. Sadly, I see this all too often after I leave a project. I can code it perfectly and then someone else comes in and damages things within a year or 2. If all the websites I ever built for others were still in the same condition I left them in when I handed them over to the client, I could write a few dozen nice, pretty portfolio project pages. But the most I can often show a few years afterwards are a few early screen shots.. the websites themselves no longer exist or exist in a damaged state that is too embarrassing to link to. At least in the case of Freedom Health, having experienced this too many times, I've kept good screen shots and a little bit of history as I've watched the damage happen.
I write this snapshot page with some displeasure. I loved the team at Freedom Health, admittedly. But I do contract work and future clients always want to see past work. The current state of freedomhealth.com is truly detrimental to me, personally. So I provide this as a critical evaluation of how the website has evolved, the same I way I critically evaluate all my own work. I was trained this way as an artist and that training has proven invaluable over the years. Details do matter. And, as a web developer, software engineer and occasionally even a system admin, my attention to detail is a prerequisite to excellence and reliability.
Originally, after I redesigned the site(s), business literally doubled for Freedom Health. That would have been mid-2019 to early 2020. It was a very good year for them. However, those gains will most likely be somewhat lost due to the current inaccessibility of the website at small sizes. If current statistics are correct, over 60% of internet users today use cell phones, not desktop computers, to access websites. Your mobile view is more important than the desktop! And to customers, your website says a lot about the amount of attention that you pay to the rest of your business.
Keywords
Drupal 7, Drupal 8, Drupal 9 migrations