Web Design

This is a website I designed for a very good client of mine, Denise Randall. She is a local painter in Plymouth and makes remarkable works of art. I created a website for her back in 2008 and started playing around with the idea of creating a brand new, fully redesigned website for her in summer 2012. I spaced the amount of time spent on her website between December 2012 and early February 2013. Her website is all HTML5 with some CSS3 tricks, and even utilizes WebSockets! Not only did I have a lot of fun building this website, I also learned a hell of a lot about HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, WebSockets, and even how much easier it is to use OO in PHP and Javascript for certain tasks. Her new website features a portfolio section where she can showcase her artwork. She also has a section for Dog Treats which originated from a section on her twice-monthly newsletters entitled "Cooking with Hanna". The site also features a Store allowing visitors to buy prints and original paintings from her without having to go through eBay. Behind the scenes, this website features a completely redesigned Contenet Management System. This allows her to edit her online portfolio, edit her store, add new recipes, edit and send newsletters modeled after her site, and create HTML code for her eBay listings. When editing newsletters or creating HTML code for eBay listings, she can open a Preview window which automatically updates when she changes text, a picture, a watermark, etc... Additionally, because she has so many photos uploaded to her website, I wrote an algorithm to check for duplicate photos, and added categories to her photo manager which allows her to categorize her photos so she may easily pick from them when working on a newsletter or eBay listing.

Si Devices, Inc. is a fairly new startup located in Waltham, MA. All of the Si Devices staff graduated from WPI. Three out of the four of them (myself included) graduated in May 2012. The company's mission is to help large buildings (primarily hotels) save on their energy bills by utilizing an energy management system setup and monitored by Si Devices, Inc.

This website was built during the summer of 2012 for a local Poet living in the Pinehills in Plymouth, MA. This site was extremely easy to build since there were no photos to juggle or cool affects requested by the client. In making the background, I decided to take a public domain abstract art image and fade it over itself such that when the image is placed next to a duplicate of itself, there are no discontinuities at the boundary between the images. The Content Management System I designed for this site uses AJAX heavily and allows the client to add new books to the site and poems to each book. A poem can be made "invisible" (meaning it will not show up anywhere on the website) by simply clicking a button. The order the poems are displayed can be changed with the use of a drop-down menu, as can the book the poem is a part of. Each poem can also be given a preface and a footnote (footnote shows up on the Featured Poem page if the poem is listed as the featured poem).

This is a simple, yet informative website I wrote to keep track of progress made on my Major Qualifying Project at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. This website assisted myself and both my project partners in keeping track of what we have tried and in what direction to steer the project. About the Project - We started out trying to design an analog-based motino-activated LED lightboard, and ended up creating a working prototype of a modular display made up of an array of small 8x8 RGB LED boards. Our final prototype was successfully tested using a printed circuit board we made specifically for this project (even though the pins on the PCB did not match up with the pins on the 8x8 RGB LED matrix). I currently have a working prototype of this project using a microprocessor, one 330 ohm resistor, an op-amp (one that I made out of transistor ICs in an IC design class) to supply 5V to the microprocessor, a few current sink/source transistor arrays to supply current to the RGB LED matrix, and a 12V DC adapter I mutilated which originally belonged to a Linksys router. About the Website - The website was written all in PHP and has a custom-designed backend I used to add entries, links, and upload files to each entry. The server is capable of correctly displaying the data from a file whether it is an image or a C source code file. All the data (minutes entries, links, and information about uplaoded files) is stored in a MySQL database. Any and all source code for this project that is uploaded to this site can be viewed in the browser (the web browser pulls the source code from the server using a simple AJAX request).

This website was designed during the summer of 2011 for a new high-end hair salon which opened off of exit 5 on Rt. 3 during the Spring of 2011. Like my other websites, this website was created with its own backend to control all the prices listed on the website, their hours of operation, and the articles displayed on the Media page. This website really helped their business since a lot of their customers commented on how professional their website looked and how well it flowed together. In fact, it helped their business so much that they sold their salon one year later during the summer of 2012! For that reason, this website has been decommissioned, but remains visible on this website as an example of my web design ability.

Bourque and Cole is a company owned and operated out of Sandwich, MA on Cape Cod. They specialize in Building Custom Homes and engineering some gorgeous home rennovations (for people with money to spend I might add). They wanted a website that was rather simple but filled with photos of all the work they've done on houses in the past. On top of that, they wanted to be able to change as much of the website as possible without having to go through me.

The website I came up with for them is very spectacular and easily managed by the user. On the main page of their site, photos cross fade from one to another seamlessly in a well-engineered loop. They have a Photo Gallery section with numerous different galleries filled with photos of work they've done. Every time the user wants to advance to the next set of photos, the javascript on the page loads all the thumbnails AND the photos for the viewing section of the site to allow for the user to click through the photos without waiting for them to load. Any of the text on the About Us page they have full access to change, as will as some text on the home page and Testimonials page. Once they upload a photo, they can easily select what galleries to put it in by selecting which ones they want in a small menu that pops up below each photo in the backend I wrote for the site. They also have the ability to easily delete photos from the site and add more in batches without having to go through me. The site extensively uses MySQL and numerous PHP and Javascript functions. I was also able to easily create the graphics for the sides of the main section of the website, the logo, and the buttons and drop down menu under Photo Gallery. I am very happy with the way it came out, and, needless to say, the customer is very happy with the site.

My largest and probably favorite of all would probably be the web-based database I wrote for this business. I have the ability to print out invoices for any item, I can easily create new entries, edit existing records, delete existing records, and view statistics for all the entries that exist in the database (right now, the total is at about 850 entries). I also have 3 separate types of databases: one for regular appointments, one for purchases, and another for workshop entries (I use this database for ongoing projects that I am working on outside of appointments, for example, web design, and lengthy computer repair projects involving replacing some hardware components or some other time-consuming task). Recently I have updated my database to use MySQL, and have created a new database for clients to list their contact information complete with a vCard importer script.

I took the photo gallery mentioned in the section above and added some functionality to it. This includes the ability for admins to rotate photos already on the server, comments are displayed while browsing the gallery, and information is displayed about each photo while viewing them individually. Once the photos are uploaded, the server shows the status of the upload and compile process (creating thumbnails, extracting data (creation time, size, GPS coordinates (if available), etc...) to the user in an easy to read status log. There is an easy-to-use administrative back end to the gallery which is not visible to anonymous viewers.