Simply My Care

Simply My Care needed a website that did more than describe services — it needed to actually run the day-to-day operations of a home care and supported living provider: staff scheduling, client care plans, and secure communication between carers, clients, and admin. The previous WordPress site couldn't support any of that without a maze of plugins, so it was rebuilt from scratch in native PHP.

The platform is deliberately framework-free — a good fit for a small, focused application where a full framework's overhead wasn't worth it. Every database query runs through a single Database:: PDO wrapper, authentication and role checks live in one Auth:: class, and every POST form is CSRF-protected. Staff and clients each get a role-scoped portal: staff see their weekly rota, assigned clients, and log completed visits; clients see their upcoming visits, care plan, and care team, with internal messaging connecting everyone without exposing anyone else's records.

Email — enquiries, password resets, notifications — runs through PHPMailer over SMTP rather than PHP's unreliable built-in mail() function. The site deploys to IONOS shared hosting via FTP, with a gitignored config.local.php keeping real database credentials out of version control.