Nightcap Hotels
A new national hotel brand
Nightcap is a new hotel brand, launched in April 2018 by Australia Leisure & Hospitality, a subsidiary of the Woolworths Group. I built this site on Silverstripe during my time at Fastrack.
nightcaphotels.com.au/
This site was built with a tight performance budget - which I love. Finding novel ways to improve user experience just gets me fired up. In order to balance the interactivity needs with the site's performance needs, I rebuilt the tooling and completely re-organised the way Javascript was approached with this project.
React is used for the datepickers and the location autocomplete across the site, but I didn't want to allow the bulky framework to affect load times, so the scripts are all deferred, with the interactive elements taking a progressive enhancement approach - for example, allowing text entry that then hydrates the autocomplete once it mounts.
The datepicker is a core feature of this site and is an extended version of React-dates, AirBnB's open-source datepicker library. The inline datepicker was wrangled to mount to specified input fields and optionally fetch price and availability from a Fastrack proprietary API when passed room details.
This site also uses my original SCSS grid framework which utilises calc() and allows the styles to fit within a single 23kb stylesheet. These aggressive performance optimisations allow the site to achieve a usable state in under 4 seconds, even first-view on a 3G connection.
