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Projects

I think that any one who has been developing web projects for several years will have more projects that are either A) Not something you'd want to showcase because it is so old B) No longer online C) Another developer has taken over the project and it is no longer 100% your creation.

90% of my body of work falls in to those three categories.

The End Is A Good Place To Start

BLUE OX TOW BARS (Reborn on Date February 2012)

My most recent project, Blue Ox Tow Bars, is an e-commerce site built on the Community Edition of Magento.

This website is a complete re-building of our legacy Blue Ox Tow Bar site (see below) on the Magento framework. Our data and other assets were so out-of-date that I basically started from scratch on this not wanting to pollute it with the previous sites issues. It is a custom themed site with many modifications in search, category, product and cart page layout and functionality. I've added in 3rd party extensions for mega menus, one-step checkout and vehicle look-up. Graphics are my creation including the logo. Various icons obtained from iconfinder.

Product data, SSL, email, web hosting, authorize.net, site configuration, analytics, content (have I forgotten anything?) were implemented by me.

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ROADMASTER TOW BARS (Reborn on Date November 2011)

My most recent project, Roadmaster Tow Bars, is an e-commerce site built on the Community Edition of Magento.

This website is a complete re-building of our legacy Roadmaster Tow Bar site (see below) on the Magento framework. Our data and other assets were so out-of-date that I basically started from scratch on this not wanting to pollute it with the previous sites issues. It is a custom themed site with many modifications in search, category, product and cart page layout and functionality. I've added in 3rd party extensions for mega menus, one-step checkout and vehicle look-up. Graphics are my creation including the logo. Various icons obtained from iconfinder.

Product data, SSL, email, web hosting, authorize.net, site configuration, analytics, content (have I forgotten anything?) were implemented by me.

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PROHITCHES (Born on Date January 2011)

My most recent project, ProHitches, is an e-commerce site built on the Community Edition of Magento.

This website is completely developed by yours truly. It is a custom themed site with many modifications in search, category, product and cart page layout and functionality. I've added in 3rd party extensions for mega menus, one-step checkout and vehicle look-up. Graphics are my creation except for the logo and various icons obtained from iconfinder. I've also developed PPC specific landing pages (such as this and that) in conjunction with our Google Adwords PPC specialist.

Product data, SSL, email, web hosting, authorize.net, site configuration, analytics, content (have I forgotten anything?) were implemented by me.

I did not agree with the third-party link building strategy.

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FANTASYRACINGCHEATSHEET (Born on Date December 2009)

Fantasy Racing Cheat Sheet is my #1 passion project. It continually gets polished in evenings, wee-hours of the night and marathon sessions on weekends, holidays and vacation days.

This is a subscription site I developed using the Codeigniter PHP framework that takes NASCAR statistical data manipulation to a higher level. It provides subscribers with tools to view NASCAR race data in ways that no other NASCAR site does. The sites user-base are fantasy NASCAR players that love to mix-match-and-tweak statistics.

The database is MySQL and efficiently designed. The site implements jQuery UI functionality and AJAX scripting along with e-Junkie and PayPal integration.

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DISCOUNTCARSPOILERSDIRECT (Born on Date February 2010)

Discount Car Spoilers Direct is a site I built after the owner went to the SEMA show in Las Vegas and connected with a car spoiler manufacturer here in Fort Worth, Texas.

The site is built on Pinnacle Cart and extremely modified by me to create a custom theme that included automotive year, make, model and style look-up.

Pinnacle Cart is a reasonably priced e-commerce shopping cart that worked fairly well for this project. Technologies I used for my modifications were PHP, MySQL and JQuery. I also ran the Google Adwords campaign for this site with much success. Our initial cost-per-conversion when I created the campaign was around $120.00. After several weeks tweaking the campaigns and creating more specific ad groups I got the cost per conversion down to around $20.00 with some very targeted segments ridiculously low.

The site is no longer accepting orders and is for sale if and when we get around to seriously trying to market it.

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QUOTEBUNNY (Born on Date April 2008)

Quote Bunny is another personal project I've developed, not just because I like quotes, but because I love the challenge of designing a normalized database that has oodles of data in it.

I've always liked to collect things. Great quantities of data is, to me, like collecting CDs, MP3s, model cars and things like that. Quote Bunny has 14,200+ individual authors, 103,600+ quotes, 707,500+ quote keyword relationships, 11,880+ proverbs and 41,190+ proverb keyword relationships.

I don't even know how many pages the site generates due to all the combinations. My attempts to sitemap it even with one of the best sitemap generators always results in failure. I'm sure with some tenacity I could figure it out but I've not taken the time.

Quotebunny is built on the Codeigniter PHP framework and uses MySQL as its database. I scripted custom PHP and MySQL functions to scrape (yes, scrape) quotes from various websites. In the process of building this site my MySQL skills grew as well. I'd love to continue to get author images for each page but Quotebunny has become very low-priority for me. I've learned mostly from this site that a HUGE footprint is not but a cog in the wheel of huge traffic.

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ROADMASTER-TOW-BARS and BLUEOX-TOW-BARS (Born on Date February 2004)

Roadmaster Tow Bars and Blue Ox Tow Bars are basically identical sites with similar products by different manufacturers. These domains date back to February of 2004 as kludgy old Dreamweaver template sites. I didn't build those initial version, nor did I develop the current custom shopping cart framework they use. We hired Figaro Interactive to do that. I did, however, head up complete design and development of the site on top of the Figaro framework. I was assisted by Dennis Guten in building out these two sites as well as seven other automotive product sites similar to these.

When Brit Gardner, the code-monkey at that time with Figaro, explained the logic around this custom shopping cart it was my first introduction to the concept of MVC programming. The structure is loosely based off of his work with cakePHP.

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THE AUTOMOTIVE SITES

I refer to these five sites as The Automotive Sites because that is what we called them in-house. These domains were the ones being run when I joined the company. Just like the two tow bar sites above they were all Dreamweaver template sites using a third-party shopping cart. I was responsible for re-designing, data-management and manipulation, content creation, fine-tuning and polishing and moving these sites over to the custom shopping cart built by Figaro.

These sites have all been sold to Cequent. They still retain the design and functionality I built in to them.

• Hitch Finder
• Reese Hitches
• Bike Racks Plus
• USA Trailer Hitches
• Draw-Tite Hitches

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ALERALASH (Born on Date)

Alera Lash is one of several micro-sites I have developed.

This site uses Codeigniter because it is lets me develop rapidly. Not a lot of bells and whistles here except some custom analytics I built in to track referal sources and visitor actions. The design is original and mine.

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ACAIBERRYMAXX and COLOCLEANSEMAXX

Acai Berry Maxx (by far my most infamous site) and Colocleanse Maxx were sites I developed when the owner sold our automotive sites and set his sights on the lucrative supplements via trial offer and automatic billing concept.

Don't shoot me though. I was just the messenger! I got credited with being way smarter with my design elements than were actually true. It was a few months after designing these micro sites that I left the company. I hated the direction the company had gone. Everyone (including the attorney general of Texas (pdf)) considered these sites and our companies intent to be a scam. The acai berry site sold $10 million worth of Acai Berry supplements in 6 weeks. Our automotive turned supplement call center went from seven people to 50 people in a week to try to handle customer service. We spent thousands of dollars on software and computer systems to handle the demand but it was futile. Emails piled up in the 1000's every day and the expanded phone system simply couldn't handle the amount of calls coming in. For all intents and purposes it appeared that we didn't want to talk to customers. The reality is no matter how many bodies we threw at the issue it didn't help.

These sites caused a lot of people frustration and cost them money they had a hard time getting back. During this time I remained at my same web developer salary as when we ran our automotive sites. I didn't personally cash in on any of the sites profits. As I stated above it was at this point I left the company.

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The List Could Go On-and-On

• WordPress: I have been working with WordPress since their Mingus release (version 1.2). I've custom themed probably 25+ WordPress sites since then. I have definitely built more WordPress sites than any other CMS software. I championed the WordPress cause at the first two (and only) web design companies I have worked for but no one bought in to the value of it. Live and learn.
• Phone Detective Online: Another databasing challenge web site. There are like 7.9 million possible phone number combinations in the United States. Figuring the most efficient way to build that database and script the pages (it's a Codeigniter site as well) was a fun challenge.
• Data Manipulation: I have been the go-to-guy to sort through, database and spit out usuable data for the manufacturers we have sold products for. Mostly we have sold automotive products that are year, make, model and style specific. I've written scripts and sorted through some of the sloppiest manufacturer data in existence to successfully spit out html to create tens of thousands of eBay listings at a time.