Overview
Designed and built a custom CMS-backed marketing website for a local plumbing business, covering the public site and an admin system for day-to-day content and operations. The goal was a fast, branded lead generation site with tools the business could manage without developer help services, bookings, promotions, and site content. Stack: PHP, MySQL, Apache, Composer, and Docker for local development.
What was included
- Public marketing site: home, services, contact, blog, gallery, and deals/promotions
- Admin CMS: pages, media, settings, user roles, and plugin management
- Operations features: contact/booking forms, job scheduling workflow, services catalog, testimonials
- Extensible plugin architecture (forms, scheduling, blog, gallery, page builder, and related modules)
- Auth and security basics: session-based admin login, role permissions, CSRF protection, optional two-factor authentication
- Branded front-end theme and responsive layouts for desktop and mobile
Challenge
The business needed more than a static brochure site: marketing pages, lead capture, and internal job workflow had to work together without a heavy off-the-shelf platform. The main constraint was keeping the system simple to run and maintain while still supporting modular features that could grow over time.
Approach
Built a lightweight custom PHP application with a plugin-based architecture so features like forms, scheduling, and content modules could be enabled independently. Connected public form submissions to an admin job workflow, used environment-based configuration and Docker for reliable local development, and focused the public site on clear calls to action, service coverage, and trust signals that support local lead generation.
Next step
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