A very good friend of mine, Mike Domde wanted to redesign his real estate web site and save some money in the process.  He was using an all-inclusive hosting service that specialized in the real estate industry.

I was able to pull the content from his old site, make it fit into the new design and set up in a CMS to make it very easy to update the content. Mike was paying a very high monthly cost for the privilege of hosting his web site and maybe making a few content changes every few months.  I opened an account for him at Dreamhost, and installed the his new site there.  Now, his monthly web site bill is 25% of what he was paying.

For this site, I used MODx, which I like very much– in fact after using MODx, I see absolutely no reason to develop a static web site ever again.

I added a nice database-backed photo gallery using only javascript on the browser side for Henry Levine Design.  There was an existing web site, and I was able to integrate a full CakePHP application into the existing site.  This way, the photos and information about them could be manipulated using an administrative web interface on the back end.

Even though the photo gallery uses fade techniques usually only found in Flash movies, this site uses scriptaculous for its visual effects.

My friend owns a business delivering real-estate flyers around the bay area. He needed a web application to take orders (both from his customers as well as his employees on behalf of customers) and manage those orders. The site was written in Rails and is completely custom based on his business goals.

It provides a modest public facing side for customers to place orders, get product information and contact the business. The ordering process is more complicated than the traditional shopping cart because of the various options a customer has in selecting a product. Credit card transactions are handled through Authorize.net.

There is also an administrative side, in which authorized users can view and edit customers, orders, products and services. All information you see on the public facing side is editable through the administrative interface, such as the FAQ, prices and product descriptions.

The site can be viewed here.