The Artbox - Refactoring

OpenClassrooms project context :
Shortly after starting my freelance activity, I was contacted by The Artbox, a modern art gallery, to work on their showcase website. The site had been developed in HTML and CSS to present the exhibited artworks, but updating its content was becoming cumbersome. The goal of the project was to make the code more modular and easier to maintain while strictly preserving the existing interface.

The website relied on a repetitive HTML structure, which meant that even simple changes required editing multiple files. This organization increased the risk of errors, slowed down content updates, and made the project difficult to scale. The main constraint was to improve maintainability without altering the visual rendering or adding new features.

I reviewed the existing codebase to identify recurring elements across the site, then refactored them in PHP to centralize shared components. This restructuring streamlined the project architecture while preserving both the website’s appearance and behavior.

More specifically, I:

• isolated reusable blocks such as the header, footer, and shared sections;
• replaced repeated HTML code with PHP includes;
• preserved the existing design and CSS styling;
• worked from the provided repository to produce a clean, delivery-ready version;
• prepared a ZIP archive of the refactored code in line with the client’s requirements.

The website remained visually identical, but its structure became much easier to update and maintain. Future content updates can now be carried out more quickly, with less code duplication and better overall readability. This project allowed me to deliver a concrete technical improvement without impacting the end-user experience.