Website building

In 2004 I was asked by the local church whether I could mean something for them, in the form of a member of commity or department. That is nothing for me I thought.
I had heard of a requirement for a website. To involve youngster and older youngsters with the religiously life. I proposed to arrange a website for the church. After an OK of the church council I could start.

First I made an inventarisation on wishes and goal of the website. Using this data, and help of a colleague and friend Chris Hansen, a template was created. Chris worked already on a website about photography, dslr.nl.

In 2005 the first version of the website was launched. It was made with Frontpage. The website was in the air and ran locally on a PC at home. Frontpage does not create efficient code. Because of the in-efficient code and the local webserver-PC at home, the website was not very fast.

The next step was to optimize the code and to change to PHP code. Also the webserver at home was not ideal because my internet line was rather slow. Shortly after optimization of the code, the website was hosted by a proper hosting provider One.com.

The speed of the website was now sufficient. The management had improve too. I had to rewrite all delivered articles into code.
For such a situation you need a CMS (Content Management System) package. I tried several and started to use WebsiteBaker. This is a CMS which combines ease of  use, multi language, flexibility and the possibility to use PHP code. The church website is since the beginning of 2010 completely tranferred to WebsiteBaker. Several groups and departments have started to maintain their own pages on the site.
In 2016 the church council asked my help to restructure the website to a commity decided it had to use CMS Wordpress. I didn't had any handson on Wordpress and learned about the positive and negative sites of it. The idea was other people could maintain the site too. Currently the site runs under Wordpress. And I am the only one who maintains it.

All this time Chris Hansen has encouraged and helped with the improvement. Thanks Chris.

In the meantime I worked on other websites too. The techniques used vary from Frontpage, PHP to  WebsiteBaker CMS.

An even bigger project came along after I met Markwin Meeuws at an concert, who ran the website  progstreaming.com. His website streams, mainly progressive, rock music. Hence the name. People contacted him whether it was possible to stream the music to Apple devices like iPhone and iPad.
Because flash was used, that was not possible by default. I told Markwin it is technically possible.
This was the beginning of our friendship and I made an inventory to see what was needed. The site ran under an old version of WordPress CMS. And was a pain to maintain. I decided to rewrite the whole site, and retained the template because that was OK, and used WebsiteBaker and underlying PHP scripting. This improved the maintaince time with 500%.
In the years following we enhanced the site with other players, bands in town links, youtube links etc. Also we created some daughter music sites on the same principle. 

More and more requests came in when people knew I like creating websites just for fun.
Besides Website Baker I also now use Wordpress. 

An overview of the portfolio you see below.