Website Development by Kenneth Todd

My Design Philosophy

My design philosophy is to try and keep things simple. I do not enjoy waiting for a page to load and figure most people don't either. I like looking for ways to make things more efficient and load quicker. I enjoy spending time tweaking queries to the database in order to improve any process to achieve better performance.

A Bit of Background About Myself

I began tinkering with web pages back in the late 1990s with the discovery of Adobe PageMill that came bundled with some piece of software. It began as a place to post pictures and maybe write down some noteworthy events in my life. Soon after I began to tired of the bulk of the WYSIWYG editors and began code by hand and have never lost interest. I headed off to college in 2003 to pursue a career in desktop application programming, but it never appealed to me in the way I was hoping. A few courses did appeal to me, however, a database class and a couple of web programming electives. After those classes, I had figured out what I wanted to do. I picked up an internship in Ann Arbor at MAHLE Clevite Inc then part of Dana Corporation as a contractor in June 2005 where I began exploring the world of PHP and MySQL. I graduated from Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI in 2007 and continued my work at MAHLE Clevite Inc.

Portfolio

The following is a brief portfolio of my more recent design work. Many of my active projects are intranet applications for MAHLE Clevite Inc. As a result, my public portfolio is not as rich and interactive as I would like. I have spoke with the company and was able to grab some screen shots of some of the intranet applications I am working on.

• MAHLE Clevite Applications
  • Phoenix - This project has been my primary responsiblity since work began on this cataloging tool in late August 2008 as a test case in order to get a piston catalog out that was several months behind. The catalog was in print in mid-to-late November. Since then, the system has been expanded to be used by all of MAHLE Clevite's product lines. To date it has printed six catalogs and published numerous electronic PDFs as well.
  • Launchpad (Light Vehicle) - A slight adaption from the CEEK applications I developed a few years prior, this site contains data for all of MAHLE Clevite's part families and displays them once released from the Phoenix system. This site updates daily from the data entered into Phoenix and additional part data from the AS400 system giving the customer the most recent part data MAHLE Clevite has. The shopping cart on this interfaces to the electronic ordering system tied to the AS400. The eventual goal pending some data cleanup on the engine kit line is that the Light Vehicle CEEK site will merge into this site and reduce the number of applications we display.
  • Custinfo - Sales Force Reporting Program
  • Site-wide Template - This site template is based on the current MAHLE corporate template. Several modifications needed to be made in order to be compatible with our applications, such as adding switching from a static to a dynamic width as well as the ability to hide the right column. The original template had some bugs and quirks in the menu system that needed to be corrected. The layout is done entirely with CSS and is coded to web standards.
  • CEEK Applications - Clevite Electronic Engine Kit Sites