Web Development

Official Website

http://placentia.org

The City of Placentia is located in northern Orange County, California and has a population of over 50,000 residents. They had a static website utilizing HTML tables for layout, which was still a common practice when it was designed early on in the new millenium. It was difficult and inconvenient for them to keep updated, so in 2005, they awarded me a contract to redesign their website and develop a custom content management system that would be accessible and easy-to-use for their personnel. The application I developed included all the standard features of most CMS's, including user accounts and roles, automatic HTML formatting, event calendars, promoting articles to the front page, file and image uploads, customizable navigation with pure CSS drop-down menus, etc. This was all painstakingly developed in Classic ASP, and designed with clean and semantic XHTML and CSS. While the graphical design elements may seem a little outdated now, the CMS functionality and front-end coding behind it was quite ahead of its time.

When it launched in 2005, my intent was to have the City of Placentia's website be one of the few sites at the time, including one of the first official government websites, with valid XHTML. In hindsight, there are some things I would do differently now, including using Drupal instead of putting in the time and effort in developing my own CMS. However, for my first major web project, I am pretty satisfied with the outcome, plus it made for a great learning experience.

UPDATE: In May 2010, the City of Placentia launched a new website, retiring the site I created for them after nearly 5 years. For reference purposes, my version of the site can still be accessed on the web via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, starting from November 2005.