Beneco: a custom CMS for a static site

Beneco is an American company, founded in 1987, helping public works contractors grow their businesses while looking after their employees' futures.

Their website was static HTML with a design that had dated, and it had the problem every static site eventually has: nothing on it could change without a developer. A price, a name on the team page, a paragraph about a new service — each one was a request, a wait and an invoice. In 2005 a site was not editable unless somebody built that part too.

So the work came in two halves. Smakgraphics designed the new site. I built the content management system underneath it, written from scratch in PHP and MySQL and fitted to exactly what that site needed to expose — no more than that, because every editable region is also a decision about what someone can get wrong.

What I built

• HTML pages built to match the supplied design.

• Every editable region wired up as a PHP variable, read back from the database on page load.

• An admin panel behind login credentials.

• A WYSIWYG editor on each content field, so editing the site meant typing rather than learning HTML.

The outcome was the one they had asked for: a site that looked current for its moment, and a team who could keep it that way themselves. For anything that was only words, the developer left the loop.

The site has since been replaced; the CMS described here is no longer running.