The Gray Geek

I was asked to revamp the O'Neill Benefits Group Brokerage website by Pat O'Neill, the owner. Pat had commisioned an earlier site with the intention to differentiate herself by providing customer access to important information about their policies and coverages. The problem was that the old website was unwieldy. She had to pay to have it updated whenever anything changed. If one of the carriers issued a new version of a form, that form had to be updated on the website for every customer who used the form.

I built a database containing all their information, and implemented a dashboard though which OBGB could manage all its own data, without having to call a programmer.

This is actually a business system as well as a customer website. Nearly all the paper which OBGB staff used to maintain about their business, regarding carriers, clients, policies, plans, contacts, service representatives, site users, and all the documents, links, and information about renewal dates, provisions of coverages, riders, etc. is all now contained in the business system, accessed through the dashboard.

Now if a carrier issues a new form, the staff merely upload the form into the database from their pc, adjusting the plan or policy affected to indicate when the new document is effective.

The database is built with MySQL. The code is PHP 4, with a Pear database abstraction layer. I'd have used PHP 5 but the site is hosted at a commercial service which doesn't support PHP 5 yet.

The graphic design was done by Kerndt Design.

You can visit the production OBGB, Inc. site here, but most of it is password protected. Clients have passwords that enable them to see information about their own coverages.

A test site exists containing the identical code, with a database that has been sanitized to mask the names of clients to preserve their confidentiality, and to prevent database updates. Contact me for access to it.

Pat O'Neill (303)389-9852 or pat@obgb.com