Website development is much more challenging now than it ever used to be. The ever changing mobile culture means that websites have to work everywhere and on every device and with devices becoming more and more powerful and with hundreds of variations this makes responsive design and development very challenging and has added multiple layers of complexity to any project.
My experience
I am a frontend/Wordpress developer based in Edinburgh, Scotland, I was at my last posting with The Gate Edinburgh for over 10+ years. I was responsible for taking digital designs and concepts and bringing them to life on the web for various clients.
Recent projects included a new site for The Scottish Digital Academy integrating their online and classroom based learning services with a site capable of displaying this content and making it easy for users to find relevant courses, a safety website for Road Safety Scotland, A site redesign and rebuild for an international intallectual property lawyer based in Edinburgh, an information hub for a Scottish charity and an informational website showing Scotland bikers some of the best roads to ride and how to be safe doing it.
Prior to working in Scotland I spent around 15 years in West Yorkshire, firstly on the print side of a large direct mail company and then eventually teaching myself the ways of the web which is when I joined the newly formed Ingenious Rapport internal Digital Agancy of Communisis, during my time here I worked on many sites for clients such as Diageo, Natwest/RBS, Direct Line for Buisness and Nationwide. I was also part of a team that designed and promoted a celebrity cook book for an international fundraising campaign, this cook book won us an award for best fundraising campaign as part of an international competition and included recipes from such names as Arnold Schwarzenegger, his Strudals are to die for.
During my time at Ingenious Rapport I also started further online studies into web and interactive design, I studied for an HND in Interactive Media Design through the University of Hertfordshire and an organisation called the Interactive Design Institute. Since coming back home to Edinburgh I have further honed my skills by completing various courses from uDemy and bettering my understanding and knowledge around accessible and more rcently sustainable website design and development.
Design
I'm happy utilising design packages such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch and Figma to get what is in my head onto the screen, I'm also comfortable finishing off other site design projects inorder to get them moving into the development phase.
Develop
This is where my skill set really shines, I can confidently and accuratley take concepts and finished designs and recreate them pixel by pixel and make them pop on the web. Wether this be flat HTML, WordPress, web banners or emails.
Deploy
Deploying a site wether it be flat HTML or a CMS is no easy feet, but I can help with this, wether it be your own server or one that I source for you. I can spin up new VMs liase with existing hosting companies and get the server working its hardest for you.
My particular set of skills
- HTML, CSS, SaSS
- JavaScript, jQuery
- PHP, MySQL
- WordPress theme development
- WooCommerce
- Joomla
- FIGMA
- Photoshop
- Illustrator
- inDesign
- Google web designer
- Web banner design and development
- Responsive design and development
- Accessible design and development
- Email design and development
- HubSpot, Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor
- cPanel, WHM, Plesk
- Git, Git-flow and BitBucket
- Google Analytics Integration
- Site maintenance and aftercare