Custom Analytics Platform

My Hotel Wedding, a referral platform connecting couples with wedding-friendly hotels, needed a way to track how users actually moved through their site and no off-the-shelf analytics tool fit their business model closely enough. I built a fully custom analytics platform from the ground up: a PHP and JavaScript data-collection layer paired with mobile-responsive admin dashboards for reporting.

Title

Front & Back End Developer

Context

Freelance engagement, working directly with the My Hotel Wedding team.

Scope

Owned the project end to end — event tracking, data pipeline, database schema, and every admin-facing report.

My Hotel Wedding needed to track unique user actions — page loads, button clicks, and other custom events across two distinct user types (hotel reps and brides/grooms) — then surface that data in reports their non-technical team could use to gauge how well the site was performing. Generic analytics tools couldn't model their specific two-sided marketplace or the custom actions they cared about.

• Event-tracking layer

  Problem

  Generic analytics couldn't model this two-sided marketplace or its custom actions.

  Fix

  PHP/JS tracking of page loads, clicks, and custom events into MySQL over AJAX. Small freelance client — not big-data scale; exact volume not remembered.

  Result

  Hotel-rep and couple activity landed in a database the client owned.

• Users dashboard

  Problem

  The team couldn't see activity trends split by user type over a chosen range.

  Fix

  Users dashboard with presets and custom date ranges, charted by user type.

  Result

  Non-technical staff could read who was active and when.

• Hotels module

  Problem

  Hotel inventory, reps, status, and views were not visible as a working list.

  Fix

  Most Hotels by State chart plus a sortable, paginated hotel table.

  Result

  The team could scan the marketplace geographically and by property.

• Hotel drill-downs

  Problem

  Aggregate hotel stats hid who viewed a property and which RFPs came in.

  Fix

  Detail pages for RFPs, page views, and every bride/groom who viewed that hotel.

  Result

  Each hotel had an audit trail, not just a count.

• Finance module

  Problem

  Client checks were tracked outside the same system as usage.

  Fix

  Finance module for payment status, check numbers, and paid/logged dates.

  Result

  Billing status sat next to the activity that justified it.

• Mobile-responsive admin

  Problem

  Reports were useless if they only worked on a desktop in the office.

  Fix

  Mobile-responsive Laravel MVC admin views.

  Result

  The client could check reports from any device.

• Laravel analytics admin

  Problem

  The client needed custom dashboards; I wanted to build that layer in Laravel.

  Fix

  Built analytics and admin reporting in Laravel — honest reason: I liked working with Laravel for that part of the site, not a forced incremental migration story.

  Result

  Custom reports the WordPress public site couldn't have produced off the shelf.

Gave a non-technical client clear visibility into how their two-sided marketplace was being used — replaced guesswork with real data. No proven behavior change from a specific report; the win was they could finally see the numbers.