But why??? Well, as it turns out, there were a few reasons for it.

When I first built this site, it was intended to be a sort of online resume. It was a place where I could demonstrate knowledge that was outside of the domain of my 9-5 job and of places like LinkedIn. Here, I could tinker around with the things that I deal with, either directly or indirectly at work.

For example, in the context of using my company's web product, I was responsible for the back end, or "model". Views and controllers were all handled by different teams and were not something I dealt with as a part of my job description. So, my first objective was to be able to get a better understanding of all the pieces and how they fit together to create the user experience for a website. I went out and learned the basics about the basics:

HTML
CSS
JavaScript
JQuery
CSS
PHP
MySQL

I chose frameworks for both the PHP and CSS, slowly learning my way around them. After getting comfortable and building sites for a few friends and clients, I wanted to re-visit this site and apply some lessons learned along the way.

My second objective was to address some of the bigger issues for items that were put together the best I could a few years ago, but now seemed to need an update. This included things like content management where I wanted to normalize the table structures and data and bring the security up to higher standards. I addressed the security issue by using the official security extension of my PHP framework (CodeIgniter). I did a lot of research on the table structures for the data model, and while I am certainly not a DBA, I'm more confident that I have picked a better structure.

Lastly, I wanted to change the look and feel of the site using a different front-end framework. I chose Materialize not only because I like the minimalist look and feel, but because it also has so many helpful features. This isn't to say I like it better than Bootstrap, but I wanted to do something different than my other sites. Over the next few months as I finish building out the functionality and "polishing up" some of the rest of the functionality, I'll be posting about it here. I look forward to the discussion.