Portfolio

An innovative young company in the skate industry needed a website for selling their transparent and flexible skateboards, and for connecting with fellow skating enthusiasts. One of the cofounders of the company asked me to build such a platform for them.

Using the winning combination of Drupal and the Ubercart e-commerce system, I built a new website that had all the standard shopping cart capabilities, with payment acceptance using PayPal Website Payments Standard. The website had numerous informational pages, a contact form, a dealer inquiry page, an image slideshow, and a form allowing visitors to sign up for the company newsletter (hosted by MailChimp). Social media is increasingly important for online marketing, and their new website featured links to the company's Facebook and Twitter accounts, a Facebook widget on the home page showing followers, and a media page with embedded YouTube videos. The client was excited and happy with the final result, partly because within days of the website launch, the company had received several orders from customers.

Many business owners find that an effective way to promote their ventures and gain new customers, is by joining forces with owners of complementary businesses and together giving free seminars. One of my clients wanted to do exactly that, and asked me to quickly build a new website that could explain to prospects the value of participating in his seminars, and easily register for one of multiple seminar dates.

In just a couple days, I created the website using a combination of images and text provided by the client, as well as PHP code for handling visitor registration and a contact form. My client's event was a success for him and the other business people he teamed up with.

Several business directory websites provide visitors with crowd-sourced reviews of local businesses. This new project had the goal of offering merchant listings of about 45 major metropolitan areas in the United States — initially about a quarter million businesses. It focused on the target audience of American boomers (ages 50-64) and seniors (65+), who are becoming more technologically savvy and active.

Drupal 7 was the clear choice for the web framework because of its data management and geolocation capabilities, including proximity search. Consequently, tens of thousands of new merchant listings could be imported from CSV files in a matter of minutes. Geospatial data could be input using the import process or Google's Geocoding API web service. Visitors were quickly able to find all merchants within a 10-mile radius of any address, with the option of limiting them to one of 45 business categories. Each listing included the merchant's name, address, phone number, year of founding, industry, any website address, and any discount offered to seniors. Visitors could add their comments about the merchant, read those of other visitors, and see the merchant's five-star ranking. The site had a unique merchant composite score that instantly incorporated many important factors and was updated after any modification of the listing, and periodically with the latest user ratings. The owner could create database backups. The website was monetized using Google AdSense ads.

To be successful, a business website does not necessarily need such capabilities as user registration and login, content access permissions, form pages, and other dynamic functionality that require heavy web scripting and a database. A static website is completely adequate for any organization that needs only an online "brochure". For instance, a client was so happy with a previous project I had done for her that she asked me to build a brochure site for a licensed therapist who offers psychiatric diagnosis and treatment for patients with various mental conditions.

For this project, I chose a foundation of a prebuilt template that uses HTML5, the Bootstrap framework, and JavaScript for animation. I then replaced all of the boilerplate text and menu items with those specific to the target business, and added blog posts with custom images. Both clients were very happy with the results, and the overall project required little clock time. In addition, the website had no security vulnerabilities and no need for code updates, thereby saving the clients money.

I inherited from one client an online diamond and jewelry store. It suffered from obsolete web technology, a cramped design, no backups, and poor technical maintenance (by a web agency unfamiliar to me). One day the legacy website fell prey to attackers who inserted malware into its many JavaScript files. So the client asked me to build a brand new version of the website, much better than its predecessor.

Using Drupal and the Ubercart e-commerce system, I built a new website that offered all the features requested by the client: The pages listing the diamonds and jewelry products could be sorted by any of the columns, with a single mouse click. Products could also be found using standard search controls. The primary and secondary navigation menus were easy to read. A shopping cart summary was always visible to the prospective buyer. There were two sections for items on sale and new arrivals. The client could easily add or modify products — each with an image, color categories, and all the other information associated with a diamond or piece of jewelry. The client requested that a simple theme be used, to make the store operational as soon as possible. Despite the limited development time, the website was fully mobile-ready for handheld devices, such as smartphones. Later, I added a blog section, so the business owner could add keyword-rich content. I then configured the website so that each new product listing and blog post was automatically published to Twitter. Also, the latest tweets were displayed on the client's home page, automatically.