I am a web-developer and designer focused on creating engaging web-sites and applications, using standards-based development. I currently live, work and play in Bristol, England, and am part of the team at U4EA Technologies, focusing on networking solutions. Creating user interfaces is my passion, and something I take every opportunity I can to further my own knowledge and creativity.
I has been developing web-sites since 1998, and like to challenge myself with each new site I work on, by using something new, or developing a new technique to work with. In this way I have become proficient in many web development and graphics packages, although my main tool of choice will always be a text editor.
I have a wide range of skills that I use for web-development, including extensive use and knowledge of PHP, CSS, SQL, Javascript and XHTML. I also manage my own web-server (the one this site is on in fact), and administrate domain names for several clients. Along with these fundamental skills I have a good knowledge of several other programming languages (C, C++ etc), Adobe Flash, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Freehand (this list is only scratching the surface..). I have designed and developed e-commerce sites and secure payment gateways, while always considering search engine optimisation to help improve hits on the web-site in question.
I also have extensive expertise in communications networks, both wireless and wired, through my Ph.D. research and electrical engineering degree from the University of Edinburgh. From this I have the full range of abilities to go from the basic server side operations and the network, to the user interface and client relation skills I have developed during my career.
I believe strongly in web standards, and standards based development (as do an increasing number of others). I try to separate content from function both in terms of the user interface and the back-end processes. This makes for clean, easy to maintain code, which can be understood by others should they need to see it. There are times when the rules must be bent to make sites work in all browsers, but I try to avoid this whenever possible.
One of the most exciting web standards to come around recently is the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) specification. Many see SVG as a competitor to Flash, but I think its potential is much great than just that. Being able to mix SVG and HTML (MathML and so on as well) opens massive number of doors for developers and user interface designers such as myself. Browser makers are starting to catch on to this (particularly Opera) and hopefully this trend will continue.
Content management is a big issue for web-developers, since we want to concentrate on developing new software, and not fixing typos or add new content for people who can't read html and so on (as indeed most people can't). I've used several content management systems which are currently available and found most of them to be lacking in several aspects. The most common being forced to use templates for designs. So I decided to develop my own Content Management System (CMS) called SpryPanel which is design independent, totally flexible and easy to use. While not perfect (yet) I've got a lot of ideas I want to work on for it, particularly a new user interface for CMSs.