Arkansas House of Representatives
About Arkansas House
The Arkansas House of Representatives, along with the Arkansas Senate, compose the legislative branch of state government. Combined, the two bodies form the Arkansas General Assembly. You can read more on their about page.
About The Project
Mission: Deliver a complete platform rebuild for the Arkansas House of Representatives, replacing the legacy website with a modern Laravel-based solution featuring a comprehensive Content Management System. The CMS enables legislative staff to perform full CRUD operations on representatives, news posts, events, and staff directories—with all changes automatically reflected on the public-facing website.
Technologies Used: Laravel (PHP Backend Framework), League CSV (Data Export Library), Bootstrap (Responsive Frontend), Google Maps API (District Mapping), MySQL (Database), On-Demand PDF Generation.
Links
Before: From the Web Archives
After: Visit new live website
Summary
This project marked my entry into professional software development, where I architected and implemented the complete backend infrastructure for Arkansas state government. The engagement established a long-term relationship that continues today through ongoing contract work for feature development.
The core deliverable was a comprehensive CMS enabling legislative staff to manage all website content independently. I implemented the League CSV package to provide instant data export capabilities, allowing administrators to generate spreadsheet reports of currently elected representatives on demand.
My responsibilities focused on backend architecture—designing the database schema, implementing RESTful routing and controllers, and connecting data models to frontend views. I also delivered mobile-responsive enhancements to the "Find My Representative" mapping tool powered by Google Maps API.
The client continues to contract with me for ongoing feature development. A recent example is the on-demand PDF generation system, which allows representatives to distribute their news posts as professionally formatted PDF newsletters to constituents.