Web Design & Development Projects

Laravel Website Maintenance | Manufacturing Application

I got a new client about a month ago that wants to remain anonymous. I don’t like that, but they insisted. I’ve already had one other client ask for this as well, so it must be pretty common. I think it is mostly for competitive reasons.

One reason I love this project is it is built in Laravel 4, and although I have a lot of experience with PHP and some experience with Laravel, I’m still learning a lot. It has been fun to do everything from designing routes and setting up controllers to migrating the database and modifying models. Yay for Laravel and MVC, I love it!

Not only am I getting to do a lot of back-end work, I also get to apply my Angular skills to adding new features and functionality to the front-end.

Up to this point in the project I’ve been killing a lot of bugs, but one highlight for me is a new page I added to edit company data. I’ve owned this page from the ground up. I created the wireframe, added the migrations, modified the models and used Angular to add the functionality. What used to take a user 3 page loads, editing company data can now be done in one, and for any company. Thank you Angular.

I’m sure I’ll talk about this project again in the future, but I’m writing over the Christmas holiday and I need to go get some hot chocolate. 🙂

Website Maintenance | Squarespace Development | Real Estate Website

I’ve done a little work with Hearthfire Creative in the past couple months that I thought I’d mention. Lexi, the founder, is uses an affordable combination of some cool technologies to improve the usability of real-estate sites.

Lexi did most of the work, but reached out to me for some technical help when needed. Both sites were built in SquareSpace using iHomefinder. I did some html/css modifications to style the iHomefinder iframes correctly as well as integrating iframe widgets into the SquareSpace site.

They were fun projects and I thought I’d mention them in case anyone reading is interested in an upgrade to a real-estate site.

PHP Development | API with Oauth 2.0 | Space Web Application

Lots of technologists are moving towards separating the front-end and back-end of their web assets. The front-end of a site becomes a stand-alone application that consumes endpoints (http accessible URLs) for business purposes. The back-end becomes an API, or a group of endpoints. There are lots of reasons for doing this; one is that it makes it easy to add another client (not a client in the business sense, but in the web sense, like Android, IOS, web app, Facebook app, etc.) in the future because all resources are just endpoints that can be accessed from any internet connection.

Separating the front-end and the back-end of SpaceNav was one of my first recommendations and it is fun to finally move towards it.

The big problem with allowing anyone online to access a resource is that you want to make sure it can only be accessed by authorized parties. A common and trusted way to authenticate an API is Oauth 2.0. There are easier ways, but Oauth sets a good foundation for future growth no matter what new client you want to add.

Oauth isn’t complicated to understand, but it is a little more complicated to implement.

After I got a firm understanding of Oauth and its different grant types, I found a helpful package and wired it all up. It took surprisingly little effort to get it working. Most of the time was spent figuring out the best way to integrate it with our current authorization.

WordPress Consulting | Website Maintenance | Boulder Bike Tours

I hired a handyman to do some work on my house and it turned out he needed a website. Like many small businesses, he had a very small budget, so small that I typically can’t help much. I gave him some options and we came up with a plan that worked for him.

Herschel, my new handyman, picked my brain about ways he could keep the budget down and he decided to open an account at wpEngine because they help manage server security (he had lots of issues with Bluehost). He watched several YouTube videos and found a highly recommended theme, installed it himself and learned how to use it. When he hit a wall, he reached out for help. Sometimes I could walk him through the issue and other times I just made the changes for him.

In the end, he got a nice looking site that allows him to update content and make changes without the help of a developer.

PHP Development | Website Maintenance | Space Web Application

I’ve posted about working with SpaceNav before, but I just finished building a cool page that I wanted to share. I’m really excited about this project because I got to do everything for the page, including the PHP endpoints.

We’re in the process of migrating the whole site over to be an Angular front-end and an API back-end. I’m not 100% sure what the back-end will be built in, I’m leaning towards Node.js because of my JavaScript background, but it may end up being Laravel because the company already has some PHP experience.

With the whole site architecture in transition, I’m building everything as if it is on the new architecture. That adds a little overhead, but it will be well worth it when we finally rip the band-aid off and migrate.

This project was fun because I got to dig into the databases and queries. I also got to use the data to show the charts using Google Charts. The page turned out really well. The queries are blazing fast compared to other parts of the site, and the charts animate giving you the data in a beautiful way.

I also enjoyed learning to give a table a fixed header. The table on the right scrolls while the header stays in place. I built an angular directive that uses jQuery to wait till the table is created and then clone the header. It works surprisingly well and is easy to add to any table now.

Website Development | JavaScript | Reebok Customer Service

I wasn’t supper excited about this project when I got it, but it turned out to be really interesting. Voltage had built several customer service pages that were populating the content dynamically using JavaScript but Reebok requested it be changed to to be hard-coded for SEO purposes. Because Reebok is built in Demandware, this was a significant challenge being that the content needed to sync up through all pages and yet be update-able easily.

Voltage reached out to me for my JavaScript expertise to make it function the same way, but not be created dynamically. I used PHP and JavaScript to remove the dynamic creation and instead made a page generator. This way, updates to a page can happen quickly when the content changes, but the content is still in sync across all pages.

The project must have went well because now they’re sending me Adidas and Crossfit.

Ecommerce Website | Shopify Development | Clean Energy Website

This was a fun project and a little bit stressful. The fun was because I got to develop the Shopify theme from the ground up using the new Shopify Plus features, the stress was because they added several pages and features after I gave the them an estimate. We went a little over budget (it could have been much worse), but they were quite happy with the end result (I survey all my clients and they gave me a 9 out of 10).

My task was to develop a theme that my client (anonymous by request) could reuse for sites that feature affiliate products and sites that allow a user to get an instant rebate. The design was supposed to be identical to their existing site and if you compare them side-by-side, they’re really close. I also improved a lot of stuff along the way including some styles to make them easier to maintain and some JavaScript events to make them work better across all browsers.

The project had a couple challenges, the biggest of which was customizing the checkout process. This is a new feature with Shopify Plus and their documentation is lacking. In fact, I found a bug in them and suggested some improvements. It is nice that you can customize your checkout url and the look and feel more, but the downside is you can’t change the flow at all.

Let me just say that I’m still blown away that Shopify hasn’t added a good way to add meta data to site objects (products, pages, collections, links, etc.). You still have to use a browser plugin and themes are more prone to bugs because of it.

In the end, I’m happy with the final product.

WordPress Development | Medical Website

This was an interesting project. I don’t usually build websites using an existing theme, but that was the client’s request so I obliged. It worked out and their bill was under 2k, which was nice for them. I installed the Bridge theme on Pantheon, did some initial theme setup, and then asked the client to take it away. They obviously put some serious time into making it look good and it worked out. After they worked to get everything looking good, they emailed me to fix some stuff they couldn’t figure out and it turned out to be a successful project.