I just finished a small project doing some renovations for Work Wheels USA.  Their previous web development company created a content management system (CMS) for them, but Work needed some additional functionality and customization so they contacted me.

The challenge with this type of project is having to go through somebody else’s code to modify it.  At the same time, I have to be able to mimic the current site so that everything flows nicely in terms of code AND in terms of the user interface.  In other words, to a normal website visitor, it can’t look like somebody came in later to do a patch job, and to a programmer looking at the code, things need to be consistent so you don’t need to learn how to read coding styles from two different people.

Lucky for me, the people who previously developed the site for them did a great job with the programming, as their code was very legible and organized.  I even picked up a couple of organizing techniques from them that I’m already using right now at work.

The most noticeable thing I created for Work Wheels USA is a rotating front page slideshow.  These rotating slideshows are super hot these days.  Even though I don’t think they are very good for search engine optimization (SEO), they grab a human’s attention and allows for presenting multiple content in a single area.

The other things I created were just to allow them to swap out certain images and content here and there, things you will probably never notice because for the most part they look the same right now.

This site is programmed in PHP, which isn’t what I work in mostly, but I dabble a little in it, and it’s nice to know how easy it was for me to get acquainted with it and even finish a PHP project in such a timely manner.

My goal in the next few months is to really get my hands dirty with PHP and .NET.  I’ve been holding myself back for far too long programming in classic ASP (10 years!!).  It’s time to start get relevant with today’s popular technologies.

Anyway, this one is done.  Time to start working on a few others I have sitting around waiting for me!  I’m looking forward to the Joomla project I have coming!