Butch McGuire’s Irish Pub is a downtown Chicago landmark, helping people get hopped up and make bad decisions since 1961. Well, whoever they got to design their website had 9 too many Car Bombs before they sat down to code the thing. But now that they have a slick, easy-to-manage website, they can spend less time sifting through HTML and more time sifting the flour for their onion ring batter. Seriously, last time I was there, I bit into a belt buckle.

News and blogs? Check. Automatically updated according to what day of the week it is daily specials widget? Check. Dynamically skewed images and promo area, requiring no image editing software and only the handful of brain cells it takes to say “Another pint, please?” Check, one-two. That last part took an additional dash of scripty shiftiness, but now that I have successfully tilted the thumbnail, I don’t think if I can ever go back to right angles.

As a Hungarian-American born and raised in Southern California, designing a website for an Irish pub in Chicago seemed like a logical career milestone. But of course, PHP knows no race, creed or color, so I say bring me your tired designs, your poorly-coded static HTML pages, your huddled masses of mid-1990s slop yearning to breathe free.