Brandon Plasters' Web Application Development and Design Portfolio

tjmillerdoesnothaveawebsite.com A Flex/CakePHP website for Los Angeles based Comedian/Actor T.J. Miller. T.J. needed a site to help promote his Comedy/Acting career, so I developed a highly interactive site with lots of animation, video clips, an event calendar, a mail list for email blasts, and entertainment sections. I've worked closely with T.J. to develop humorous concepts for the site and it was my goal to translate his humor style into an animated site.

jilliansorkin.com A Flash-based website for a Los Angeles photographer, Jillian Sorkin. My client needed a clean and unique design for an online photo album to promote and advertise her business, and an easily manageable Flex interface to update and organize the photos. I used CakePHP for the backend with a Flex frontend and XML for communication.

phoible.org A rich Flex and CakePHP application for use in the Linguistics Department at the University of Washington. It currently is the largest database of phonological inventories in the world. The objective was to create an application with an intuitive interface to input phonetic language data of all known world languages. I worked closely with the project manager, developing the MySQL database for use with my implementation of the CakePHP framework. The JQuery javascript framework was also used for search auto-complete functionality. XML was used to communicate between the Flex app and the CakePHP backend. An in-person demonstration of the application is available upon request since online access is only available to administrators.

dlawg.com An informative site for Denton Law Group, LLC- a Chicago-based law firm. The firm needed a competitively designed website that stood out, yet maintained a professional corporate feel while on a budget. I designed the site using CSS and jQuery to produce subtle, yet polished designs and effects.

www.selectitaly.com Worked as a developer using PHP, Javascript/JQuery and Flash for an Italian travel package website. Responsible for maintenance and development of both the production site and content management site used within the company. The client site has an online store with shopping cart. I've also integrated the website with third party web services including a mailing list application and an Italian airline booking application. I've communicated with non-technical departments to develop administrative interfaces, page designs and layouts. I played a major role in producing a modularized pricing system so that travel packages could be custom-bundled using the content management system. The website department team had four developers within an environment that promoted team cooperation. www.selectitaly.com generated over 100,000 unique visitors per month.

maps.centerstage.net A dynamic Flash map application of the greater-Chicago area established in 2005, the 'original' Google Maps. The functionality included animated marker icons with address geocoding, dragable map feature, zoom feature, and crossroads search. I used PHP for the backend and communicated to Flash using delimited text data. I generated image tiles of the greater Chicago area using AML scripting with ArcGIS mapping software. The tile generation process ran continuously for three days to produce over 50,000 image tiles. This map was ubiquitous on centerstage.com, a Chicago night-life and dining website, and was preferred over google maps for years. At it's peak in July 2007, the map generated over 1.2 million hits from 62,000 visitors in one month.