My time at Americanidol.com demanded nimble and flexible development via semantic html (99% of work invovled full CSS supported markup and tables only used for tabular data) in order for pages to load quickly and to meet tight deadlines. Significant production experience: the pages received millions of unique visits because most were announced on the show and linked to within the site's main navigation. Note: I did not design any pages, I just constructed them. Most of these pages have been updated.
Every week, I was in charge of building the Americanidol.com email newsletter sent to millions of subscribers. The newsletter consists of one static html file, that displays correctly in various online email services, and was traditionally built using a text editor. After a few weeks of building the newsletter, I realized I had fallen into a development pattern that could be replicated via programming using forms, PHP, and DHTML. During my free time and through my own initiative, I developed a process oriented drag and drop newsletter editor that is intuitive enough for even non developers to use. The result has been a faster newsletter turn-around and a newsletter generation process virtually free of human error. Results that are highly valued in a high paced environment dealing with high profile work. Lastly, because I utilized an MVC (Model-View-Controller) design pattern, the application was adapted in minutes in order to generate Mark Burnett & Steven Speilberg's Thelot.com's newsletter.
Articles were being called by a an id within the URL (E.g. mxdwn.com/article.php?sid=46) which was causing a problem with search engine indexing and traffic.
I used mod/URL rewrites (.htaccess) together with PHP/MySQL to have mxdwn.com/article.php?sid=46 resolve to a more intuitive and search engine friendly URL: mxdwn.com/reviews/2003/Jurassic_5/Power_In_Numbers. Moreover, I programmed any permutation of the above URL to produce a result:
In addition, I made the following URLs available for other categories across the site:
Before my work, the site received around 12-13k unique visits per month. One month after my work, search engine indexing increased substantially and uniques increased to approximately 17k.
