Mercy Hospital in Nampa Idaho is a client of BBG Marketing.  Mercy wanted a calendar created for their website so they could input events and have them come up in order with certain details, like time, duration and location.  At the time there just weren’t any open source applications to install, so I wrote them custom application to suit their needs.  It was pretty cool.  They could add, edit and duplicate events with a few clicks and they would display through the day of the event, then disappear.  

For the events that recurred every week, the calendar would display the single event with multiple dates, but as the date passed, it would disappear leaving the rest of the dates for that month.  Seems simple, but it was quite the ordeal.

I always liked working for Mercy Nampa.  A couple years ago their parent corporation, or whatever you call the big group a hospital belongs to, changed hands and the new company had internal web guys.  They had me help with the transition and even had me take care of a few things before the final change, but I haven’t worked on their stuff in a while now.  I’ll have to check out the current site.  See if it’s as good as the work I did.  :)

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Brent is a musician from the Portland area.  He spends a big chunk of the year traveling around doing concerts and needed a way to sell tickets on his website.  He already had the website, but had no idea how to integrate PayPal and a shopping cart.  He called me and I took care of him.  Not a huge project, but it was a pleasure listening to his CD while I worked.

He also had an email list he needed to be able to manage through his website.  Pretty easy stuff these days, but it used to require some javascript editing to get those list managers to look like your site.  I think it came out really well.

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Goin’ Postal and Copy Copy Shop is a locally owned franchise that does everything shipping related, like packing your packages, sending it by the best carrier, holding your mail, renting post office boxes…  All that stuff.  Copy Copy Shop, obviously, is a copy shop.  Color copies, zillions of them?  No problem.

One pretty cool thing I did custom for them was adding a Google search bar that you can paste any tracking number from any carrier into and Google will sort out who the carrier is and show you where it’s at.  Oh, two cool things.  The icons on the bottom of the picture have a hover over action.  When your mouse goes over them, a tool-tip-like window pops up telling you about the service you’re hovering over.  Pretty slick.

I also gave them custom email addresses that customers can send documents to be printed.  Nothing amazing there, but some of those documents can be HUGE.  My server handles it no problem and I was able to give him a disk quota big enough to not run out of space after a few of those HUGE files.

If you need to ship your Christmas gifts, or anything really, I highly recommend Dave at Goin’ Postal.  He’s local and he’ll do a good job for you at a fair price.  Much better than the UPS Store.  None of the money you give them stays local.  That’s bad.

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Mercy is another client of BBG Marketing.  BBG has a designer they use for all the layout and pretty stuff.  What their designer can’t do well is the PHP and MySQL integration.  There’s really not that much on mercyrose.org as far as database stuff, but they have the ability to add stories to the home page, all formatted properly,   They also have a calendar and a few other things that are directly PHP/MySQL integrated by me.

Oh, they also have this website they use to let site viewers check drug interactions and procedures that I tied into with a custom A-Z Search that you start on the Mercy website, then forward a properly formed query straight into the other website’s database to get the results.  Pretty cool.

Over the years I have also done hundreds of text and code updates.  Some redesign work to add elements that weren’t originally included.  They also ask me to add buttons here and there, so I have gotten pretty good at taking original Photoshop master files and adding text or buttons or whatever, then replacing what’s on the site with it.  The site gets a ton of traffic, so anything you do has to be done correctly, quickly and seamlessly.  I guess I do all that because they keep coming back.

Oh, I can’t forget Facebook.  I integrated a Facebook Like Box and Wall Feed into the template too.  I think it looks pretty good.  It’s not quite perfect, but there’s really not much  you can do with a Facebook Like Box to make it look better.  At least not when I did it.  Maybe it’s easier now.  I should check into that.

If your site is behind on updates, or you just need something added on, let me know.  I can do just about anything.  If I can’t do it, I’ll be honest.  That’s never happened though.  Google is a great resource for learning.  :)

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Atrio was a client of BBG Marketing, a local company I do a lot of maintenance and back end coding work for.  They came to me with Atrio because the database was having some issues and they needed to be able to get the drug information for their plans to display properly on their website.  Every month I would receive a couple monster text files that needed to be imported into their MySQL database.  Once the initial coding was done it was pretty easy.  Just a matter of backing up the database, blanking it out, then importing the new text files.

Atrio had a change of leadership a couple years ago and started using a different company to do their website.  It’s ugly as hell now, and not cross browser compatible.  Good thing I’m not looking for a Medicare Supplement plan.  I can’t see their contact info in their header because I’m on a Mac.  Pretty sloppy.

Don’t let your website only be seen properly by people on one browser, or one kind of computer.  Cross browser compatibility is important these days.  More and more people are on Macs.  Even more are finally tired of Internet Explorer and all its problems and are using Chrome, or Firefox, or even Opera.  You need someone who tests cross platform and with multiple browsers to make sure your website is usable by all the people who want to give you money.

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This was a quick job I did in 2009, or so.  They just needed a way to display a store locator that they could update themselves.  All back end work, except for the map.  Looks like the locator has been taken down now, but it worked really nicely when it was up.  :)

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The UCC Foundation wanted a website where they could send students to fill out scholarship and grant paperwork.  The main idea was to allow the students to fill out their criteria information online, then have a way to export the information so the Foundation folks could sort and look at the information in a more useful way.  In the past, they had to take paper applications and type the criteria information into a spreadsheet.  Very time consuming when you have several hundred applicants and 60-75 criteria each.

I was able to give them a custom database application that gives them one or two click access to all the information they need.  One button exports all the student criteria into a spreadsheet.  Saved hours and hours of time.  Another button prints all 450+ applications (3000+ pages) in a single click.

Upgrades planned for next year include the ability to convert all the applications back into a PDF that includes a couple documents the students upload into the system and a way to send only specific applications to the printer, as distinct files, that can be stapled and hold punched automatically.

Pretty cool deal, really.  A lot of work went into it and the client was pretty thrilled with the results.

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LVP is actually a client of a local marketing company.  They had already created the website, but needed a custom reservations system.  That’s when they called me.  I was able to give them a calendar that shows available hunting pods for specific days, an email reservations request form and a database that kept it all straight.  The system has worked well for several years now and allows LVP the ability to spend less time on the phone and more time doing what they enjoy.

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