Web Design and PHP Programming Portfolio

Here is a sampling of the web design and programming projects that Matt has completed. His skills are primarily as a programmer. The designs are mostly created by their owners with some creative input from Matt, himself. Matt's primary goal is to create pages that have a clean, professional look and feel, without excessively using images.

All of Matt's code is hand-written. He prefers to operate in the LAMP environment (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/PERL); however, he has used Microsoft IIS and ASP when the job required. Except where otherwise noted, all samples are written for and hosted with the Apache webserver in a Linux environment. All databases are MySQL, and all dynamic content is written in PHP.

Mark Fromm, Composer

Mark Fromm is a composer and musician in Pittsburgh, PA. His original website, created in Microsoft FrontPage, housed a catalog of his pieces, a list of performances, a list of audio samples, and some links. The content was static, so for each new piece or performance, manual updates were necessary. The content would frequently go outdated.

The redesigned site employes a new color scheme, cascading style sheets, and a database backend. There is a simple table that houses much of the static pages, allowing Mark to edit them on occasion without needing to touch the files themselves. The performances are stored in a database, and the pages automatically reflect performances as past or upcoming. Each piece has its own page, thanks to a script that generates the page from the database. Mark can add new pieces, performances, and even blog posts with ease.

Bauer Funeral Home

The Bauer Funeral Home is a family-owned and operated funeral home in rural Valley City, OH. The original website was built with Microsoft .NET. The original site was very plain, did not display properly in non-Microsoft browsers, and even lacked the funeral home's logo and color scheme. The pre-planning sections did not work correctly. Originally, a member of the family was ranting to me over dinner about the site's condition. I mentioned that I might be able to do better with the site, and took a shot at it.

The redesigned site is simple, yet more elegant than its predecessor. It makes use of the funeral home's colorscheme, logo, and assorted images from both inside and outside the home. The administrative interface is much simpler and easier for the family to update. There are also email notificatoins sent to the funeral director when a guestbook entry is submitted or a new user registers for pre-planning.

Sally Bozzuto, Photographer

Sally Bozzuto is a photographer and artist in Pittsburgh, PA. The original website was created for a class project and maintained largely using Dreamweaver. It was home to a few small galleries and announcements of exhibitions. The layout was purely table-driven, with only a few CSS elements.

The new, improved website keeps the general idea from the old website with an updated look. Several new features were added, including a blog, a contact form, and a links area. As with the other projects, database functionality was added, making the site easier to update.

Future Projects

• Nathan Hall, Composier and Visual Artist - site revisions and backend programming