Triad of new designs
I’ve been working on three sites during the past few months, so I thought I’d officially “set them loose.”
- City Gate redesign
- Weichert, Aspen Hill MD
- Department of Energy Insight Portal (under wraps and in production)
Annie basically handed me the Weichert gig after recommending me to her boss. While initially designing the layout, I showed her the newly redesigned City Gate site. She like it enough to urge me to retain most of its design elements for the Weichert site. City Gate happened to be my first authentic PHP site, but I only really used the language for includes, the majority of which was just more HTML code.
While the brunt of the City Gate work came in the style and design, the majority of the Weichert work came in the PHP programming. I needed to create a site that was dynamic and able to do what I wanted it to, but at the same time, let people upload brochures and real estate disclaimers and have those files appear automatically and on the correct pages. I thought about creating a MySQL database in which every PDF had its own row of data, with the listing agent, state and address as applicable fields.
But on second thought, such a system would require one to interface with said database after every file upload. That would be a hassle and create another layer of potential human error. I realized that PHP was capable of dynamically displaying the correct files without a database, as long as the file names were strategically named, and uniform. PHP regular expressions now sort the contents of directories on the fly and eliminate the need to touch another line of code when a new PDF is uploaded.
