Helping local shops to survive and thrive during the COVID-19 outbreak

We had to move fast and launch in just a few days a visually appealing platform. Our team made the best use of the structure Impulso was already using. They did not need to do any extra work or adapt to a new back office. It was a fast response to an urgent need they had. And most importantly, it was flexible and scalable so we could continue evolving the platform.

We built the platform using Gatsby to generate the static pages, Type Form for businesses to submit their offerings and Google Sheets as a database.

We got support from Netlify, which offered an extension of their free services for people working on solutions for the current COVID-19 crisis. We must say, though, that Netlify was always our choice of CDN, even before they confirmed their support.

1. Create a visual identity

   The first step was to create a visual identity for the movement and replicate this to the web design we were envisioning for the platform.

   The main idea was to have a very clean look and feel and to provide an intuitive experience both for the businesses aiming to register at the platform and for potential customers looking for their services and products.

   
2. Development

   We started by setting up Gatsby and connecting it to Google Sheets to fetch data to build the list of businesses.

   The next step and a very important one was to implement the filter for the directory of shops in the platform. After some research, we’ve decided to use itemsjs, a free search engine in javascript, created to perform a fast search on small JSON datasets.

   For the implementation of the style, and having in mind that we had a limited time frame to launch the website, we decided to integrate Material-UI to make it easier to style all the website's components from the buttons to the filters.
   

The project was nominated for the top 3 social impact projects built using the Jamstack approach at the Jammies Award.