Website Development

Aug 27, 2010

Building Martel Maides a new website was a fairly large undertaking and involved a website build, plenty of custom functionality as well as a complex integration project with their existing back-end system. The website look and feel was provided by a third-party designer and my task was to build the entire site from the ground up including some elements of design, but mostly a large amount of HTML and back-end code which in this case was Ruby.

Jun 10, 2010

For this job I inherited some branding and an initial homepage design but once I started talking with the client it became clear that the design was somewhat lacking for his needs. I opted for a set of tabs at the top to enter the main areas of the site, including the blog and a secondary navigation menu on the right column of the page. The secondary navigation provided access to the services the company offer.

Apr 24, 2009

Independent Risk Reporting was a two-part project, firstly to create a simple informational homepage and contact for the client and secondly to create a risk reporting questionnaire system, this brief port covers the brochure website that was created with PHP and the Smarty framework. The site needed a clean and professional design and the homepage was relatively information heavy, including RSS news feeds from Reuters. The contact information page was seen as a key to the success of the site and time was spent making sure information was clearly presented, the contact form worked well and a google map was included.

Mar 2, 2009

Web standards and why I really don”t care Originally published: 2nd March 2009 but before the content gets lost I thought I would republish it here! I really think this view is even more valid now we have HTML5 and CSS3 appearing, not to mention dealing with IE6, 7, 8 and 9! Read why I really don”t care about Web standards

May 14, 2008

Despite the project still being in the early stages of development I managed to get to the final of Schroders sponsored Bright Young Things and received some great advise from my mentor Julian Winser. I’m sure this will all be a great help in the long-term development of this creative agency workflow tool. It even managed to generate some publicity in the local press. So, what is briefus.com [briefus.com][2] is for anyone who has to deliver work against deadlines such as project managers and helpdesks but the emphasis is on creative teams.

Mar 6, 2008

We could see that a huge amount of SEO traffic was navigating to the calculator even though the links to the calculator were not emphasised. We added the calculator to try and engage that traffic in order to improve CTE. By giving customers access to the functionality that they want we hoped to keep them on the site longer and expose them to more marketing. Even more traffic reached the calculator but CTE was unaffected.

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.