Since December 2002 I have been designing and creating websites for private clients preferring to look toward open source solutions in order to keep to budgets and still deliver high standard results.

As my experience in the industry has grown I have transferred skills learnt working for larger companies to my freelance projects and tried to apply them to achieve cost effective solutions, after all, not everyone has a million pound budget and yet the same principles of saysearch engine optimisation apply.

My role at Fortuna Networks was centred on a three man delivery team tasked with the design build and delivery of projects. These projects would range from small personal brochure style sites, larger dynamic sites delivering such content as ecommerce and web video portals to bespoke software builds with web faced portals for clients and staff. I have been responsible for company branding and re-branding, logo creation and email marketing campaigns. I have also created interactive .pdf forms using Adobe LiveCycle, full colour .pdf brochures optimised for both web and print and large corporate marketing display stands for use in shopping centres and shop fronts.

With regards to the software builds my role ranged from Information Architecture of the software and site content, establishing delivery methods and user interface requirements, to creating usable interfaces to both the front and back end of the software and accompanying web sites. I was often involved with the front end development in these projects, designing and building the components in Visual Studio and working with the back end developers to create what they needed to implement the business layer of the project.

This role was indentical to my role at Fool.co.uk as in August 2009 Fool.co.uk sold its personal finance side of the business and we became lovemoney.com.

Throughout my time at fool.co.uk and lovemoney.com I worked closely with the tech team gaining valuable experience working with .NET and Visual Studio. While my skills never reached the level of the senior developers I became comfortable working with the language and assembling the front end requirements for the developers.

The project teams at lovemoney.com would be made up of a designer, a project manager and a developer. Between us we'd take a requirement from the project owner and create a spec and evaluate the build schedule to deliver the project iteratively. This agile approach would insure the project was flexible enough to cope with changes from the project owner and still able to meet required deadlines without impacting the project costs.

A favourite task of mine at lovemoney.com was the development of a flexible html email template that worked in the 40 or so clients we tested against. The email needed to have a small footprint to ensure a fast delivery and a design structure that could handle multiple versions and changes to keep up with the high requirements of our in house editorial team. I am pleased to say that after a lot of research and testing I achieved this and created the basic template that all of the lovemoney.com emails are sent from.

Part of a 4 person design team and working in smaller project groups consisting of myself, a project manager and a developer I was responsible for the planning, design and front end build of internal projects.

This role is identical to my role at lovemoney.com as in August 2009 Fool.co.uk sold its personal finance side of the business and we became lovemoney.com.

I worked on many high profile projects for fool.co.uk including the design and build of Champion Shares, the fool.co.uk's share dealing service. A regular project that I enjoyed working on were the Big Idea series of marketing campaigns where each project required its own unique themed look and feel relative to the topic and a series of html emails and advertising to accompany the projects.

I was part of the team that evaluated our existing content management system Rhythmix CMS and planned and implemented an in house system based around TinyMCE saving the company tens of thousands of pounds a year in Rhythmix CMS subscription fees.

Virtual Webmaster was a small web design agency dedicated to delivering bespoke designed and coded websites.

I worked with clients to create effective web presences that met and exceeded high design and technical standards. This included liaising with the client as well as the delivery team to establish objectives, technical requirements and resources. This was followed up by post-launch discussion with the clients on the execution of the project and future growth objectives.

Calleo was a consultancy specialising in finance and eCommerce. During my time with them we worked for major UK firms such as Barclay's and Egg creating their online shopping portals.

Calleo Website

Working independently with our European offices I created a multi-lingual site using a combination of leading authoring packages. A secondary overhaul was conducted to combine the external site and the intranet. By writing and implementing an action plan I introduced new usability guidelines in addition to branding documentation. I also analysed several Content Management Systems to determine how these could be utilised to allow non-technical users to update content.

IndigoSquare for Barclaycard

IndigoSquare, owned by Barclaycard, was an early online shopping portal. My work on the project expanded during my time in the team and I went from day-to-day website maintenance to advising high-level decision making. As webmaster I worked in a small team to keep basic areas of the shopping portal up to date. This included website maintenance, maintaining XML product feeds and monitoring special offers between site partners. In working with the IndigoSquare marketing team I created new web pages from their concept art as well as implementing various online competitions and kept the website up to date with seasonal changes.

Calleo Administration

In working with the management and administration team I was responsible for looking for cost savings through evaluating current contracts with office suppliers, re-negotiating mobile phone contracts for the UK office and limiting the cost of meetings and other management expenses. My day-to-day admin tasks also included contacting agencies to book UK and overseas meetings and events for the management team as well as refining client presentations from the sales and management teams to ensure they fitted the corporate image.