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Labib Al Karim
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Delivered, pending launch

Freedom Township

A ground-up rebuild of a Pennsylvania township's public website, with an admin panel the staff can run themselves.

Role
Sole developer
Client
Freedom Township, Adams County, PA
Year
2026
Stack
JavaScript, PHP, HTML & CSS, JSON
Freedom Township homepage

The problem

The township's site lived on a hosted municipal platform. It was slow, awkward on phones, and hard for staff to keep current.

Residents come to a township site to do specific things: pay taxes, find a form, check a meeting date, or file a Right-to-Know request. The rebuild had to make each of those obvious without losing any of the existing public record.

What I built

  • Nine public pages covering government, the community park project, the documents and forms library, ordinances and resolutions back to 2018, taxes, Right-to-Know, news, and events. All of it is real content carried over from the old site.
  • A password-protected admin panel where staff publish news, events, and meeting agendas and minutes without touching code.
  • A scope-and-deliverables document and a content manager's guide written for township staff.

Engineering decisions

Flat JSON files instead of a database

News, events, and meeting records are JSON files that the pages read directly. On basic hosting, that means no database to provision, back up, or secure.

Frequent content vs. reference content

Things that change weekly go through the admin panel. Rarely changing reference data like board rosters and the ordinance archive lives in structured code, which keeps the admin simple.

A small admin, locked down properly

Passwords are hashed with password_hash, sessions regenerate on login, and every write requires a CSRF token.

Built for residents, not org charts

The homepage leads with tasks (pay taxes, documents, meetings, the park, Right-to-Know, ordinances), and skip links and semantic structure keep it usable with a keyboard or screen reader.

Community Park project page

Outcome

The site is built and handed off with documentation, and launch is pending on the township's side.

Next project

MavTrack