Here’s a blast from the past! I built this site in 2002, entirely from scratch, using MySQL, PHP, HTML, CSS, and a smidge of C. Until 2016, the site enabled a retired bicycle shop owner with little computer expertise to run an online store featuring vintage bicycle gear. The shop closed when the owner passed away. I have left it up as a tribute, after disabling the “Buy” buttons. It still gets a lot of traffic, in part because of the moon calendar, which provides moon-rise and -set information aimed at helping people plan moonlight mountain bike rides, a passion of the site’s former owner. The moon calendar calls custom-compiled C binaries based on phoon and gcal. Over the years, the code was ported from BSD Unix to Linux, and from PHP3 to PHP5. It is due for another facelift, from function-based PHP5 to object-based PHP7, and to responsive display code, if anyone is interested! DerbyKing.com’s homepage and product pages have the distinction of earning a perfect 100 on Google’s PageSpeed ranking, while the category pages rate 99 or higher!! This feat is more astonishing when you consider what this site is NOT doing: No page or code caching No minified code No page compression PHP5, without speed enhancements of PHP7 No high-end hosting… it’s just DigitalOcean What’s the secret? Carefully optimized SQL queries that hit the database only a time or two per page load One .css file per page Loading .js files only on pages where needed. Dead-simple DOM. Only ~300 nodes! The administrator backend is pretty fast, too. As noted, if any readers have time and interest in hacking on this, let me know, and I’ll set it up a github and release it GPL2.
New Frontier Village
This site features full-frame DSL and drone photography, which show off the surprising beauty of a local worker housing business. The site’s photo gallery highlights well-lit, carefully edited wide-angle views that show the interior of the facility’s large clubhouse, as well as its very small housing units. The site was built on Joomla, and features a contact form protected against spam by Google Captcha v2, along with a Google Maps integration complete with custom info bubble and printable driving directions. When using a mobile device, all phone numbers can be clicked to initiate a call.
Ooh La La! Skin Boutique
Perla became my client in 2016, thanks to a referral from a client at the Eleventh Judicial District Court in Lovelock. I built her site using WordPress and the WooCommerce storefront software. She has done a great job with the site, adding new items frequently, running coupon sales, and promoting it through several ad campaigns. Her product photography has also come a long way since she started a year ago.
Mountain Man Outfitters
Michael at Mountain Man Outfitters was one of my first clients. The site I built for him in 2008 was hand-coded using server-side includes, custom bash scripts that assembled javascript image galleries, and hand-polished CSS. Since then, we have rebuilt the site three times, on Joomla 1.5, Joomla 2.5, and WordPress. The site has migrated smoothly through five server operating system upgrades — all with no appreciable downtime.
Winnemucca Pizzeria
I originally built this site using the Bistro Joomla theme. I shot the photos and wrote the copy. After six years, we migrated the content to WordPress and relaunched. The intro slideshow was created from the owner’s original chalkboard art, as used on the actual menu.