Website Rebuild
- Adobe Experience Manager
- Java
- Vue.js
The Florida Lottery worked with PPK for years on various smaller web projects before asking us to help tackle their main website.
Their legacy website was slow, difficult to manage, and did not meet modern accessibility or mobile standards. Our goal was to transform their digital presence into a high-performing, bilingual platform and increase player engagement across demographics, drive sales, and prominently showcase the Lottery’s contribution to education.
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We collaborated on a solution that involved moving their infrastructure to Azure, and building their website on Adobe Experience Manager. Within that collaboration, as lead developer I was responsible for architecture, technical direction, and ensuring our small team could deliver a complex, enterprise-grade site on time.
I oversaw all technical architecture decisions, including AEM setup, Vue/Tailwind adoption, and content & component model design. I established & executed testing regimes (accessibility, browser, performance, security), and managed CI/CD pipelines.
I built dozens of Vue components in a custom Storybook environment, allowing each to be tested for accessibility & multilingual support, reviewed by the client, and refined in isolation. This allowed for rich content expression by authors without requiring developer support.
Knowing the site had to survive the rush of high jackpot drawings, I implemented aggressive caching (dispatcher & CDN), asynchronous loading for API calls, and lazy loading for media & components. High-traffic pages surpassed all Core Web Vital recommend thresholds. I wrote Locust load-testing scripts to simulate thousands of concurrent user workloads, with no failures and ﹤600ms server response times.
Accessibility and multilingual support were baked into component design and development from the start. Automated Axe audits and manual testing across multiple screen readers helped ensure we met compliance targets.
Post-launch analytic data indicated a drop in bounce rate and rise in pages per session. Our speed improvements correlated with increased winning number searches and fewer frustrated user drop-offs across both language audiences.
This project required a blend of deep AEM knowledge, modern TypeScript, high-traffic performance engineering, accessibility standards, and security best practices. It put my entire skill set to the test, and is the most satisfying project I've worked on to date.
