Melissa DeMund

Publishing at scale

At LAist I built and maintained the reusable CMS module and template library behind a high-traffic news site, then worked inside it daily. The point of that library was that producers, reporters, and editors could assemble consistent, accessible pages without a developer in the loop — so I also trained them on it and supported them when something went sideways. Working within an existing component system, and recognizing when a new component is genuinely needed rather than a one-off override, is most of the job.

QA before it goes live

My checklist, in roughly this order: content accuracy against the source; layout against the design at every breakpoint, not just desktop and phone; every link followed, including the ones in footers nobody looks at; forms submitted end to end; keyboard navigation and screen-reader semantics; and the differences that only appear between staging and production, which is where most surprises live. On a site where a bad publish is immediately visible to a large audience, you learn to check before rather than after.

After launch

Shipping is the midpoint. I review post-launch traffic and engagement data to see whether a page actually did what it was built to do, run Lighthouse and DevTools audits when something feels slow, and optimize images and assets accordingly. When a feature underperforms, the useful question is usually whether people could find it — not whether they wanted it.

Where AI fits

I use Claude daily, alongside Gemini and Copilot, and I've developed a fairly specific sense of where it earns its keep. Scaffolding components, generating repetitive template variations, tracking down why a layout breaks at one breakpoint, drafting and checking QA passes — fast and dependable. Anything touching live content, accessibility semantics, or an integration I can't see end to end, I verify myself before it ships. The speed is only worth having if the quality control is real.

VGP+ — paid civic product

A paid extension of LAist's annual election tool, built to test whether non-members would pay directly for a premium digital product. I contributed front-end engineering, including work on the JWT-based authentication gating premium features. It drove 1,675 purchases against a 1,000 target — 67.5% over — brought 889 net-new users to the site, and converted at 8.4% visit-to-purchase with a 0.12% return rate.

JavaScript Auth Product launch

Live audio player — two sources, one interface

The CMS shipped a working but bare audio player: no show artwork, titles, or descriptions, and no way to explore the current program without leaving the page. I customized it to pull from two independent live sources at once — a streaming-service API for the broadcast, and an internal GraphQL endpoint built by our backend team for CMS metadata — and built a sliding drawer for expanded program info. The hard part was keeping combined state correct as programming changed underneath it.

API integration Real-time data UI

Full-site redesign — 2025

A nine-month redesign of the entire site. I was a key front-end contributor: all typography, color, and style updates, plus nearly every front-end template and JavaScript-driven feature. Among them a scrolling background gradient that reads as one quiet effect but is actually two gradients — a full-width page background and a narrower one inside the sticky header — kept in sync as the header collapses, across viewport widths and scroll speeds, so the seam never becomes visible.

CSS Templates Design system