Salmon Falls Nursery: Salmon Falls Nursery Portfolio

2009-04-02

Design portfolio for a New Hampshire landscape design company

Working with a design company on a portfolio tool can be an intimidating process. I think Lightfin and I saw a design-savvy client as an opportunity to build something that stands out. After blogs and to-do lists, portfolios must be the most-built web applications on the planet (you’re reading this inside one right now: how meta); if you’re going to ignore the over-abundance of off-the-shelf options out there, you’d better do something interesting (and good).

Call me biased, but I think we succeeded. The elegant and easy-to-use interface complements the beautiful landscape designs contained inside. I also used this as an opportunity to update some of the tooling in my standard PHP kit. Like anyone who’s worked in PHP for more than a couple of years (I think I’m on year 9, for better or for worse), I’ve built up a framework to handle the plumbing of typical web/ database applications. This project allowed me to add some Ajax controls to the standard Edit/ Delete object workflows, resulting in (again, biased observer) a rare administrative interface that can stand with the front-end the user sees.