Website

Sep 10, 2007

Until this release very little effort had been made to increase the sites visibility in natural search engines. This version of the site was used on all none landing pages and was more text based, it went live Sept 2007. http://www.debtbusterloans.com The homepage is optimised for the UK Loans keyword (loans by itself being extremely competitive) and the design is text-heavy and quite simple to allow spiders to crawl the site as easily as possible.

Aug 21, 2007

Rails migrations are brilliant. I say this because until now I had heard of them, seen articles about them and like poor misguided VB programmers I had completely ignored them. They make loads of potentially tricky database migration, rollback and versioning issues a doddle but mainly (from my point of view) they mean I can develop more in ruby and less in SQL. This makes my development faster, easier and more standardised which in turn makes my life simpler, calmer and more fun – everybody wins.

Jul 11, 2007

I’ve entered a charity event somebody at work is running and in a bid to get the highest priced ebay item I’m shamelessly linking to my site everywhere I can. It’s a charity event raising funds for the NSPCC! The aim is to sell a £5 item from a charity shop on ebay – to make even more money for charity. This item is a Mystery Box the content of which will only be revealed to the winning bidder!

Mar 12, 2007

The Central Capital Mortgages site has been running for a number of years with limited profitability. My redesign has made huge improvements and at present other marketing campaigns have been suspended to concentrate on PPC as it has become the most profitable channel for the business. The site went live Jan 2007. This new design went live 26th Jan 2006 and had an immediate impact, with the conversion rate moving from 3.3% to 7.7% on the remortgage PPC keyword on google.

Mar 6, 2007

As the companies creative team (web and traditional) grew, we required a system for managing our briefing system. I designed and wrote briefus to meet this need. All members of our marketing department have access to the system and are able to create new briefs. One of the creative team leaders then assigns the brief to a member of the team and sets deadlines. Members of the team manage their work using their personal “to do” list and brand teams manage their briefs through the brand pages.

Dec 2, 2006

I designed the loans4tenants site and created the logo, although there was a colour scheme change before we went live. I build the site myself, including the application form, which includes optional sections and pages – up to a maximum of 10 pages. The application form includes some javascript to hide and show sections and sends it’s data through to a SQL Server database. The site was received very well by the business and enquiries were raised by approximately 50% (no data was collected on the previous site!).

Nov 30, 2006

This is the Central Capital loans and mortgages site, mainly used for marketing to customers. It links through to the centralcapitalloans.com and centralcapitalmortgages.com sites. It went live Nov 2006. The homepage is packed with marketing messages with the main emphasis on users selecting either a loan or a mortgage when we direct them to the correct site. The sitemap lists the limited number of pages on this site but also directs users to the other sites that target particular products.

Jun 22, 2006

Platinum Loans was a new brand created in order to offer an individually chosen loan plan with a low rate so that we could advertise a low APR. Compliance required that we check the users eligibility for this plan and we had to provide duplicate versions of the site for other APR’s. The design was provided by our creative team and I built the site, application form and the management of different APR versions of the site.

Feb 5, 2006

[][1] This was a relatively new brand for the company and had been untested on the web. This was entirely my project from a creative perspective and I managed the relationship with the marketing manager and conducted all of the branding, design and web development. The site went live Feb 2006. We ran a PPC campaign for 9 months but eventually it was cancelled as the quality of enquiry was not sufficiently good (too many people applying did not match our commercial loan criteria).

Mar 30, 2005

The Guernsey Electricity site combines a professional corporate look with a highly accessible structure. I have tried to emphasise the most used areas of the site (primarily the online services) while still allowing users several ways of navigating to the page they want. The site includes several areas of dynamic content such as the animated javascript news ticker and the product listings in the retail section. This content is provided from a Microsoft SQL Server database using ASP.