Past and Present

I created my first website when I was 15 years old. No doubt I would be laughed at if I showed it to people now, however I picked up some useful skills from creating it. Over the years I made websites for family, friends and personal use finding it to be something I very much enjoyed but never thought of taking seriously. About a year ago I decided to do just that and have been studying hard whilst working for the odd personal client here and there, and now feel more than ready to begin a serious career.

Me as a person

I am a friendly and respectful person with good interpersonal skills. I am neat, organised and meticulous in my work which is both my strength and weakness, obsessing over tiny details until they look perfect. I am a bit of a geek when it comes to technology, I love using computers, mixing on my decks, playing with any gadgets really. I very much enjoy traveling which I try to do every year with my long term goal of visiting every country in the world once during my lifetime.

Web Design and Development

I have listed all relevant web related skills to the right. As you can see I am a bit of a jack-of-all-trades with my knowledge, I like to branch out with my skills as much as possible. I am very efficient at writing HTML and CSS, PHP is my favourite language which I use to make my websites more interactive and apply JavaScript using jQuery to make things more fluid and aesthetically pleasing. I am more analytical than artistic, I have enough Photoshop ability to get me by but my real strength lies in writing clean and logical code. I find it rewarding working on all aspects on the creation of a website and especially seeing it all come together at the end.

I have a broad range of web knowledge and use any trick in the book I can to get useful, good looking, functional websites up and running in a short amount of time as possible. I test all my code in the three major browsers - IE7, IE6 and Firefox and adhere to W3C standards. I write my code to be as lightweight as possible and compress images as far as I can to improve loading times whilst maintaining quality. I naturally write my code to be search engine friendly and integrate any SEO tactics when I see fit.

I comment my code where I can, provide documentation where necessary and have learned of design patterns, objects and reusable code though and have dabbled in the Code Igniter PHP framework. I hand code everything using Notepad2 and phpDesigner.

My Style

My personal style of website is a clear and simple one with all the complexities hidden from the user. I understand every person has their own "vision" for their website and so I try to work from their point of view, rather than forcing my style upon them, hence why my portfolio is a bit mixed.

The Future

My long term goals are to work as a freelancer, travelling the world with my laptop and passing what I've learned on to others.

Yours Truly:

Current Web Skills:

• XHTML (7 Years)
• CSS (2 Years)
• PHP (1 Year)
• MySQL (1 Year)
• SEO (1 Year)
• Photoshop (1 Year)
• Javascript (learning)