Duncan Hines is a large consumer food brand known primarily for cake mixes and dessert products. The project was a revamp of the brand's social media-driven website, completed while consulting with Tenthwave, a New York-based digital agency. The site was built to support social content, recipes, and community engagement around the Duncan Hines product line.
The front end was built to be fully responsive across four breakpoints — covering desktop, laptop, tablet, and phone resolutions — using HTML5, CSS3, and media queries. This was a period when mobile-first design was becoming standard but many large consumer brand sites still required explicit responsive adaptation across defined breakpoints rather than fluid layouts.
Several JavaScript and jQuery scripts and plugins were implemented throughout the site. Isotope, a JavaScript filtering and sorting plugin, was used to create interactive, dynamically rearranged content grids — a popular pattern for recipe and product browsing interfaces where users benefit from being able to filter a large content library without navigating to a new page.
The back end was built on Django, a Python web framework, by Tenthwave's internal development team, which managed the application architecture, content data, and server-side logic. Front-end development responsibilities involved producing the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript layer to the design specifications, integrating with the Django templates and data structures provided by the backend team. This model required clear API and template contracts between the front-end and back-end work streams.
