The Client

Lars Hofland is an Oregon silversmith and photographer. His jewelry designs are as unique as they are beautiful. His inspiration is drawn from both his imagination and nature. I highly recommend you check out his work!

The Challenge

Lars' needs are very basic, he needs a website that is simple enough that his mother can use it while cleanly displaying his work. At some point in the future he will need a way for customers to purchase his work directly from his website.

The Solution

The real magic is not in the design of this site, it is in the back end components. I leveraged the power of the Zend Framework to create a product profile template. By using this method of displaying the product pages I accomplished several things. First, since all of the products use the same template, the profile pages are easy to change and update. Second, by using the Zend Framework to display the template I was able to assign a bookmarkable website address to each product—an important detail for any website selling products.

When the time comes, the shopping functionality can be added onto the existing structure. The Zend Framework has all of the required components needed to interface with popular payment gateways. This is important because websites that are not built with future programming in mind end up having to be rebuilt at a greater cost to the client.