Blog

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 18, 2007

Well the courier has finally taken my red-rings-of-death XBOX 360 away. The machine itself broke just before Christmas – that’s Christmas 2006! After more than 10 phone calls to support there have been at least 8 failed attempts to send me box labels by email and two failed attempts to send them by regular post. I’ll wait with baited breath to see if the b@stard machine ever turns up again. Fingers crossed.

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!

Jul 4, 2007

Ghost Recon Tube Map – Aftermath FPS games are brilliant but I always seem to end up playing on a map I hardly ever use and consequently end up spending the first half of the game wandering around lost. I thought about that for a bit and decided that what I needed was a decent map of the level I was going to play to help build up my mental picture of the layout.

Jul 1, 2007

VGA Planets is a brilliant multiplayer turn based strategy game Over the years VGA Planets is probably the computer game I have spent the most time playing – it is also probably the cheapest. It came on three floppy discs, posted from America, and once installed you got a dodgy user interface and suspect graphics inspired by various sci-fi genres. What you also got was an incredibly rich mixture of races to play and a huge variety of gameplay styles underpinned by a demanding economic model.

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.