Development

I’ve been doing Internet development for a lot of years now – just over 20. During that time, I’ve worked on everything from simple landing pages to sprawling sites with included mini-sites, to strict B2B and B2C Internet applications. Most of the code I’ve worked on over the past eight years or so has been for my employer at the time so I don’t have a lot of GitHub repos as that code is proprietary, but I’m trying to carve out more time to do personal work so my GH account will hopefully fill up quickly!

Below are some case studies of the more fun and exciting sites I’ve worked on, my contributions to those sites, and the technologies I used. Please note that I didn’t do the designs on all of the sites below, though through the development process I do get the chance to put my two cents in on the aesthetics for every site I develop – which is where my design background comes in handy! I also drive both the front-end and back-end user experience, which is great because UX and UI are things about which I have strong feelings, both for the people running and using the sites I develop and design.

I’ve had the opportunity to develop in a variety of environments including Mac, Windows, and Unix operating systems using everything from Dreamweaver to VIM, svn to git with GitHub and BitBucket, home grown PHP frameworks, YII, and WordPress – I can honestly say I’ve not been bored in many years!

Brunswick Forest

Brunswick Forest

Designed by a co-worker at a local advertising and design agency, this site provided a good number of fun and exciting challenges. Built in WordPress, the site not only contained a large amount of custom functionality, but an entire mini-site within its pages. From a technical standpoint, the sheer amount of data and interaction on each page had to be taken into consideration – there’s a good amount of data flowing back and forth, and the load times were critical in some cases.

There are sometimes up to three sub-menus (that carousel horizontally) at different points and locations throughout the structure of the pages, all dynamically built and dependent upon where the user is in the site – in addition to a custom MLS search system using two different MLS APIs, custom neighborhood tracking, floor plan availability and search functionality based on those user-defined neighborhoods, custom multi-level integration with an existing event tracking system, and totally custom overall event creation and tracking system.

main contributions:

  • Full site layout creation
    • Approximately 15 different full HTML templates with multiple dynamically included partials
  • Custom responsive CSS creation
  • Interactive JavaScript and PHP driven community map development
    •  Zooms and pans with client-controlled hotspots, vector overlays, and modal client-controlled detail information display
  • Custom advanced MLS home and land listings integration development
    • Includes filters by neighborhood, price range, bathrooms, bedrooms, square footage, listing type, and property type; sortable by price, most recent, square footage, number of bedrooms, and number of bathrooms.
  • Custom quick search MLS home and land listings integration development
    • Includes filters by property type, neighborhood, and listing type
  • Custom integration development with a third-party event scheduling plugin to provide both specialized event calendars and on-page 'coming soon' notifications
  • Custom stock floor plan search development
    • Creation of filters by name, builder, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, square footage, and neighborhood availability
    • Creation of several custom post types for client control of neighborhoods, floor plans, builders, etc.
    • Creation of dynamic relationship between custom post type and custom taxonomy - when one is updated, the other is updated as well for seamless administrative experience
  • Creation of dynamically assembled, section-specific tertiary navigation
    • Creation of CSS and JavaScript that is responsive not only to screen size but to the number of navigation items in each dynamic menu
  • Custom creation of client-controlled team member tracking and presentation
  • Custom creation of client controlled third-party vendor tracking and display

technology used:

  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • JavaScript
  • jQuery
  • PHRETS
  • SparkAPI
  • HTML
  • Less
  • WordPress
Powercard

Powercard

Over the course of three years with the company, I completely rewrote the entirety of both the front and back ends of the customer administration section of the application. I ported it from a procedural to an object-oriented code base while adding new and updating existing functionality, allowing the company’s clients to offer their customers a more customized and responsive experience for checking loyalty point totals, ordering gift cards, cashing in earned loyalty points and maintaining personal account information. I also designed, created, and implemented development and testing environments with discrete databases for both to aid in current and future development. On top of that, I had the opportunity to work closely with three junior and intern developers, most of whom have gone on to successful coding careers elsewhere!

main contributions:

  • Completely refactor existing procedural code to OOP code base
    • Client customer maintenance
    • Client customer manual registration
    • Client customer mailing lists
    • Automated client customer email campaign functionality
    • Secure login for multiple user types and roles
    • Custom survey functionality
    • Many custom and customizable client reporting tools
  • Plan, design, and implement development and testing environments
  • Add custom Facebook integration
  • Add custom Twitter integration
  • Integrate with payment gateway for secure gift card purchases
  • Create modular administrative functionality with ability to purchase modules on the fly

technology used:

  • PHP
  • JavaScript
  • jQuery
  • jQueryUI
  • protoype.js
  • highcharts.js
  • CSS
  • Microsoft T-SQL
  • Facebook API
  • Twitter API
  • oAuth
  • HTML
Carolina Gymnastics Acacdemy

Carolina Gymnastics Acacdemy

This was a fun one to design and develop. A site for a local gymnastics studio, the challenge with the design of this site was conveying the fun and festive atmosphere to the kids, while at the same time letting the parents know that their kids will not only have fun and learn, but do so in a safe environment. The first version of the site included a custom programmed front-end as well as a custom programmed admin area where the owners could update all the content on the site from page copy, menu items and order, to page and gallery images. I’ve since ported the site to WordPress with custom integration to their class management system for real-time registration, attendance, and scheduling.

main contributions:

  • Site design
  • Custom front-end code base development
  • Custom responsive CSS creation
  • Custom administrative code base development
  • Ported custom code base to WordPress
  • Custom integration with 3rd party class management system development
    • On both the custom-coded and WordPress sites

technology used:

  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • ES6
  • jQuery
  • Less
  • HTML
  • Twig
  • Timber
  • WordPress
  • gulp
  • babel
  • browserify
Personal Site

Personal Site

With this site, I gave myself a chance to play with things a bit. I wanted to do something simple but (hopefully) not boring with the design and add some programmatic customization on the back end. The design galleries are a custom plugin I wrote, and each of these development case studies is a custom post type. And it’s all done with actual code – I don’t like using plugins to create my custom post types for me. The backend is WordPress, and all the templates are created in Twig and rendered using Timber, the JavaScript for the site is es6 compiled using browserify and transpiled using babelify, and the css is minified and transpiled from .less.

main contributions:

  • Site design
  • Custom gallery plugin with album support
    • Custom JavaScript presentation functionality
  • Custom development case study plugin
  • Theme setup
    • Twig template creation
    • Custom data flow through WP

technology used:

  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • ES6
  • jQuery
  • Less
  • HTML
  • Twig
  • Timber
  • WordPress
  • gulp
  • babel
  • browserify
Wendy Wilmot

Wendy Wilmot

This site integrated a new WordPress site with existing ColdFusion MLS, rental platform, and lead tracking systems. We didn’t handle the ColdFusion, but I did all the WordPress – and it turned out to be a lot! There’s custom built searchable amenities guides, MLS record modification functionality, team tracking, open house scheduling, and more. All of it was fun and challenging, and the design was stunning with streaming video, large images, and a great color palette.

main contributions:

  • Custom theme creation
    • Approximately ten different full HTML templates with dynamically included partials
  • Custom responsive CSS
    • Full width mega-menu
    • Fixed area menu(s)
    • Slide-up drawer menu
  • Integration with existing MLS search functionality
  • MLS record overwrite functionality
    • Allows the client to define custom additional fields used to filter and sort MLS search results
  • Custom open house scheduling and tracking functionality
  • Client-controlled resources and amenities guide
    • Fully searchable and categorized
    • Multiple client-controlled result styles
    • Further sorted on custom sub-categories
  • Custom team member tracking and presentation
    • Linked to the open house functionality to allow sorting and searching of open houses by agent

technology used:

  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • JavaScript
  • jQuery
  • CSS
  • HTML
  • WordPress