Web Designer & Developer from Bristol, UK

Interests: Football, Music, Film, Web Design, Camping, Enjoying Life
Education: First Class Honours Degree - Web Design(BSc), A-Levels in Art, English & Business, CIW Certified
Core Skills: XHTML, CSS, HTML5, CSS3, PHP, JQuery, Photoshop, SQL, User Experience, Wordpress, Drupal, Progressive Enhancement
Experience: 7 years Freelance Design & Development, 2 months at Mentor Digital, Currently at Rockpool Digital In a Nutshell: Passionate web designer & developer, appreciation of web standards and accessible design, UX based design process, progressive enhancement, enthusiastic and motivated with the personal touch, excels in both team and solo working environments, attention to detail.

To view my work, take a look at my design & development portfolio

2004 - : Freelance Design & Development
Involving a range of clients including the BBC, the British Association for Information and Library Education and Research, the Education Network for Healthier Settlements, Miiram Akhter -Positive Psychology Training, Bristol Mediation and many other projects to help clients enhance their online presence ranging from full scale from start to finish design & development projects to CMS integration, website upgrades, code refactoring, payment system integration and many minor updates to sites and applications.

2011 - : Rockpool Digital
At Rockpool I have been involved with a team of system testers, technical developers, user interface developers and project management and with other members of staff I have been involved in work for clients such as Sky, Red Bull, BP and Healthspan.

2011 : Mentor Digital
I spent two months working at Mentor Digital in the summer of 2011 following completion of my degree. During my time at Mentor Digital I was involved in work on websites for NHS Bristol, Tenpin and Wincanton

Core Skills: XHTML, CSS, HTML5, CSS3, PHP, JQuery, Photoshop, SQL, User Experience, Wordpress, Drupal, Progressive Enhancement, Interface Design

Other Skills: Search Engine Optimisation, Umbraco, XML, XSLT, Joomla, Zend PHP Framework, Perl, Java, Mobile JQuery, eCommerce Integration, Analytics, API integration

Developing Skills: CakePHP, Expression Engine, HTML5 / Javascript Mapping

• First Class Honours Degree - Bachelor of Science in Web Design
• Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW Foundations, Design & E-commerce, Security)
• IT Solutions Project Diploma
• Cambridge Information Technology 103 - Databases
• Cambridge Information Technology 124 - Global Communications
• A-Levels - Art, English, Business

My personal time is filled with family, friends & not forgetting the girlfriend, I daren't forget. I find my worklife coincides with my personal life, I have always had a passion for technology, learning new things and solving logical problems so even in my spare time I find myself dabbling in bits of work to either improve a clients website, my website or just generally explore new technology. This allows me to stay on top of the latest trends and progressively enhance futures websites knowing how the technology will / won't work. Yes I find myself getting excited at any update regarding HTML5 and CSS3 especially.

I guess I should mention a bit about myself away from the wonders/frustrations of technology, design & PHP development. So here goes (not an exhaustive list):

• Football, watching and playing. I am a massive Tottenham fan.
• Attempting to learn the guitar
• Travelling & visiting places with the girlfriend
• Films & Music
• Drawing - mainly pencil portrait drawings
• Gaming - Call of Duty, Fifa, RPG's
• American Football, Tennis
• Shopping (not a personal hobby but I get dragged shopping often enough)

The basis of my website design & development is built upon people, the people I work with, the people I work for & the people who will use what I develop. I believe strongly in:

• Personal client relationships
• Providing cost effective solutions that suit the client and the end user
• Understanding the clients objectives so I can apply them to the end users objectives
• Providing a simple easy to use intuitive end product

So that is my basic approach, the appreciation of the end user is always on my mind, after all we have all become frustrated whilst using items which are supposedly 'easy to use'. If a user cannot use the product simply then I as a designer have failed. Anyway enough of this, so a background on me.

So how did I get into Web Design? This makes me feel old, my first experience with a computer came, not with the usual Sega Master System or Atari 2600 but with my dad's Atari ST 520. A machine I still own and have safely secured in the hallway cupboard for nostalgic reasons. Safely secured with the machine are the classic Championship Manager games, Sensible Soccer and many other classics. So I grew up during the internets evolution in the 90's, Geocities, Angelfire, the dawn of the internet for me.

I am a naturally artistic person, love to create and design, and love to solve problems logically - the love for these things, led me into Web Design & development. A passion I am lucky enough to be a part of as my everyday job. I have picked up many skills through my journey from courses such as CIW, working with people, tutorials and personal experience. My degree taught me skills such as PHP, SQL, XHTML, CSS, knowledge and methods essential for designing, developing and meeting standards for displaying information on the web. Areas covered include design principles, information architecture, user experience, team working, project planning, technologies, social and ethical issues, accessibility, usability and interaction design.

These are all skills I have evolved and continue to do so as my experience grows. I am extremely passionate about Web Design , and very determined (stubborn screams the girlfriend) as I refuse to give up and always endeavour to complete my tasks and continue learning about the ever evolving technologies that make up the internet. I love to produce vibrant yet accessible, standards compliant, functional user-centred web sites which provide a pleasing and rich user experience. My friendly, laid back, but driven approach allows me to work well under pressure and extremely well with a team of people, remaining calm and continuously looking to meet deadlines ahead of schedule whilst still providing extremely high standards of work. Going that extra yard to keep my client happy and provide them with innovative end results which meet existing web standards

I believe in designing with the user in mind, this I find helps create fulfilling user experiences, and I am passionate about bringing accessibility and meeting web standard guidelines in my work. After writing about internet fraud and phishing scams for my dissertation I have also developed a large interest related to internet security.

I work on a 27 inch screen iMac with a another 22 inch monitor attached, and have a Windows 7 Sony Vaio with 8mb RAM for my testing and portable needs,for an extremely efficient working environment. When dealing with clients, I look to build friendly yet professional relationships and provide a personal experience and bespoke website tailored to their requirements.