My services

Here’s what I can do for you. Do get in touch if you’re not sure what you want - I may be able to help you decide.

Web page design and coding

Although I’m not a trained designer, I can produce a good-looking website. I work best developing an existing “look-and-feel”. Most commonly, I work from supplied designs and translate them into working web pages:

I’m fully versed in the W3C’s important web standards for XHTML, CSS and DOM scripting, which are now widely supported by all major web browsers.
Standards-compliance is necessary, but not sufficient for a great website. I’m very experienced in developing sites that conform to the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (in letter, and, crucially, in spirit) for making sites accessible to as broad a range of people as possible
Further, I’m skilled in creating XHTML and CSS layouts that are semantically structured (improving future maintainability) and optimized for search engines (improving rankings in search engines like Google).

WordPress for blogging and content management

Using ColdFusion, I collaborated on building a fully-featured Content Management System from the ground up. This proved to be a valuable (and profitable!) experience, but in the end my desire to be able to get small projects up and running with a low investment - as well as the booming popularity of blogs - led me to WordPress.

WordPress is free, open-source blogging software used by hundreds of thousands of websites. Although primarily a blogging platform, it’s more and more capable - especially with a bit of expert tweaking by yours truly - of managing “static” content. That is, as well as helping you post to a blog, news, or journal-style section, it can also allow you to edit all the pages on your site, with little or no technical knowledge.

Features include:

Multiple users, and multiple levels of user permissions (i.e. administrators, editors, authors, etc.)
Easily upload and publish images and other files
Automatic generation of RSS feeds
A host of ready-to-go plugins that add handy features, such as multimedia integration and spam protection

WordPress isn’t for every site, and I’ll be clear if I don’t think it’ll suit yours. If it looks like it might work for you, I can install and configure it to your exact requirements, integrate it with your design, and get you going with using it. You’ll have a stable, powerful, easy-to-use web publishing system; and it’s popular enough that for future maintenance you’re not reliant on me for updates and further development.

I’m currently working in collaboration on WordPress projects with Phillipe Alexis at No Diamonds (based in Palo Alto, California), who is a specialist in search engine optimisation and site marketing.

ColdFusion programming

ColdFusion is a proprietary (now owned by Adobe) server scripting language that lets you build dynamic, database-driven websites. I’ve worked professionally with it since 2001.

I’m no longer as active in using ColdFusion as I was, mostly because it doesn’t necessarily suit the smaller projects I’ve become involved with recently. It costs extra for web space to use ColdFusion, whereas languages like PHP (which WordPress is built using) come as standard in most hosting packages.

The Tengai CMS

Between 2003 and 2006 in London, in collaboration with my colleague Jim Fitzsimons (with whom I worked under the trading name Tengai), I developed a fully-featured Content Management System using ColdFusion. Geared especially to be deployed for the Department for Education and Skills in the UK (many governments departments are ColdFusion-based, in the US as well as the UK), it compared very favourably with most of the other ColdFusion CMS software available at the time.

Unfortunately, the DfES’s slow adoption of the ColdFusion MX upgrade prevented us from being able to rebuild it to run using MX’s new “object-oriented” features. Its ongoing development and support proved to be beyond our scope, too. Although we no longer develop or actively promote it, it powers successful sites like the Charities Evaluation Service, and we would consider licensing or deploying it again in the right circumstances. Drop me a line if you’re interested.

Database design and programming

Apart from general programming knowledge, the main “portable” skill that grew out of my ColdFusion work is relational database design and SQL programming. I’ve worked with MS Access, SQL Server and MySQL databases, and I have a clear grasp of relational database design principles, as well as solid SQL skills.

Technical project management & consultancy

As well as being versed in various web technologies from the inside-out, I’m an excellent writer and effective communicator. This has led to my taking on various jobs to either advise clients on options for their web project, or to act as a Technical Project Manager, making sure that technical requirements are specified and understood by the client, and communicated clearly to technology suppliers.

I was contracted to help scope requirements and interview prospective technology suppliers for the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse, and acted as Technical Project Manager for Synergy Communications in revamping the Royal Medical Benevolent Fund’s website.

Consulting for other web designers & developers

Do you sometimes need some advice as you get to grips with the complexities of XHTML, CSS, layout techniques, accessibility best practices, semantic markup and other web staples? Get in touch and I might be able to help, with clear, practical advice to improve your skills and deepen your understanding of effective web development.