Wilcox Engineering

If you need a web site constructed for your small business, I can help you out. While I don't have the resources of the heavy-hitters in this field, I do offer personal responsive attention to the dynamics of your changing business. Not only that, low overhead makes for a price you can't refuse!

This site is my first whack at a CMS-based site using Joomla, and it's been quite a learning experience. I've done PHP and MySQL for years, but using Joomla makes it a lot easier to quickly put up a web site. Let's see how this turns out.

My sister site is Wilcox Estates. This is an older site that I built using Microsoft Expression Web, which is the follow-up to the now-deprecated Front Page web builder. It worked out surprisingly well, and I hooked in a php application with MySQL to handle my new photo albums. The selection of house photos, on the other hand, I had created in FP, and copied them into Expression Web for display. There is NO similar capability in the new product ... you've got to buy Expression Media to get that.

Auto-Bus runs on a Windows server at Host Department. I built it about five years ago using SiteStudio 1.6, a product of Positive Software, which comes free to use with hosting. The advantage of SiteStudio is that you can build the site, and then turn it over to your client to maintain.

The Grampian Association wanted a website to provide easy sharing of vendor & tradesmen names. Constructed this five or six years ago with DreamWeaver 4.0 and used the DW template feature to create the various pages. Didn't let DW do anything with the links though. The site uses PHP to include the navigation links, and CSS style sheet for colors. If you happen to visit the site in the evening, you'll notice PHP swaps the index-page daytime photo for a photo taken in the evening. PHP is a nice alternative to Visual Studio for server-side programming.

is one tool I used to develop a PHP/MySQL application for Adopt-A-Boxer-Rescue two years ago. I'm not doing the primary dot-com site, but rather a password-protected site that AABR uses specifically for adoption applications. The idea is to place a rescued Boxer in a proper home, and a lengthly application with references is required. That on-line application gets sent to reviewers who then match dogs to people. My contribution is to pull the applications into a MySQL database for simplified review and management of applications. That's where WeBuilder helps out. I chose it after evaluating a number of competing products - from free to expensive. It turned out that WeBuilder has the features I want and a very modest price.

When I had problems debugging the PHP script for AABR, I started looking for another tool. PhpED by NuSphere has a great debugger, and I used it to get the difficulties with AABR sorted out.

In February 2010, I started a pro-bono site for Ohev Sholom Congregation in Williamsport, PA. I decided to use Joomla for it, just as I did for this site, and it's turned out well. Content is a bit slow getting filled in, but other folks are to do that part. My job is to set the site structure in place and get it ready for traffic. I've been watching SEO, and I was delighted to find that a simple Google search for "Ohev Sholom" landed the site near the top of the first page of hits.