About me
A passionate generalist web designer and front-end web developer who loves to experiment with the latest trends in the industry while creating accessible, useable websites that work great, and look fantastic too.
Employment
- Web Designer / Web Developer
- November 2007 – Present
- ISS Web Solutions
- This involves working on a wide variety of departmental and corporate sites at the University of Leeds. Technical lead on the spring 2009 overhaul of the leeds.ac.uk corporate website.
- Freelance Web Designer / Web Developer
- 2009 – Present
- Coffeepowered.co.uk
- I've undertaken a variety of freelance work, from full site builds and CMS implementation to bespoke PHP / Javascript functionality to plug into existing sites.
Notable Experience
- Leeds.ac.uk/forstaff
- October 2010 – November 2010
- This replacement of the aging 'campusweb' site was launched successfully in the face of massive time pressures, I was principally involved with the PHP back end build and integrating the front end build within Jadu CMS including the development of bespoke functionality to support this news heavy site.
- Wellbeing.ac.uk
- January 2010 – April 2010
- This project involved building an ambitious design into a Wordpress theme as well as integrating and modifying third-party plugins to achieve a desired level of functionality on a minimal client budget. This site is a leader in its field and has achieved national recognition.
- Leeds.ac.uk
- September 2008 – September 2009
- Technical lead of the 2009 redesign / rebuild. This was a huge transformational project involving many departments and the rollout of a new institutional CMS service. I was primarily involved in developing large sections of bespoke PHP functionality within JaduCMS, interaction design using jQuery and assisting with the CSS architecture over a 12 month build.
- Coursefinder
- February 2009 – September 2009
- Full development of a system to bring the complete list of academic courses into a JaduCMS managed module. Developed using Object Oriented PHP and MySQL, with full front-end UX design to allow courses to be easily and effectively searched.
- Leeds for Life
- October 2009
- Front-end development of a challenging visual design within an ASP.NET application incorporating a high degree of layering and transparency. This build had a large focus on cross-browser compatibility and was completed within a very short timeframe.
- Business and Enterprise
- September 2008
- Implementation of design into Jadu 'Galaxies' product. This involved creating 4 separate microsites within the larger parent site. Each microsite required delivery of seperate CSS and images with no change in markup.
- Sports Alumni
- July 2008
- Full design and development in-line with existing Sports website design but incorporating Alumni colours and imagery.
Freelance
- Global Fire Training & Consultancy
- June 2010
- GFTAC approached me to design and build a small brochure site for their new consultancy business. This site was built around the PHP based Perch CMS which offered a lightweight mechanism for the users to update their site.
- Deliciously Timed Tweets
- September 2009
- Deliciously Timed Tweets is a collection of PHP based API’s which allow you to bookmark links in Delicious, and then automatically tweet them at a specified time interval. This is the code I wrote to run my @boaglinks twitter stream and I decided to open-source the code for anyone who wishes to use it, or build upon it.
- Homeofmuppets
- 2001 – Present
- This is my continual playground and side project. ‘HoM’ is a niche social website revolving around a small group of friends all over the world. The primary focus of the site is a moblogging platform which I've built over the past few years and the whole site is currently being rebuilt from the ground-up using the CakePHP framework.
- Boagworld.com Researcher & guest co-host
- April 2008 – Present
- Member of the production team for the world's longest-running web design podcast. Involved in researching latest industry news and trends. Also invited to co-host on occasion as well as the odd interview
- My online CV / Résumé
- June 2009
- I chose to build an online CV to both list, and demonstrate, my abilities and experience. I also used this project as an excuse to experiment with HTML5 and microformats which are both used.
Recognition
- Government publication: “Higher ambitions: the future of universities in a knowledge economy” (page 72)
- November 2009
- The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills featured the Leeds for Life site — for which I did the front-end build — as a case study in a national publication which sets out the government's strategy for sustaining Higher Education in the current economic climate.
- The Web Designer's Idea Book – Patrick McNeil
- October 2008
- I contributed to the design and development of the 'Havoc Studios' blog — now offline — which I co-authored with long-time friend and colleague Ryan Taylor, and was featured in this book.
- .NET Magazine – issue 184
- December 2008
- I was named by Paul Boag, along with the rest of the production team, in an article that appeared in .NET magazine, in which he pays credits to our contribution in winning the 'podcast of the year 2008' award.
