Project: http://www.shareandresolve.co.uk

Working for WebServ UK I developed an informative and simple website for this small company. The site allows potential customers to find information regarding the company and the services that they provide. I worked with graphic designers within WebServ UK to produce a website and brand for Share and Resolve that matched perfectly.

The site is powered by PHP 5 and MySQL and runs on a bespoke content management system to allow the company employees to maintain the site in an easy to use environment. It was great fun working with Share and Resolve and it’s always a pleasure to be involved in a website that exists for a fantastic purpose and to help others.

Project: http://www.independentfinancialadvicebureau.co.uk

Working for Staffordshire University I developed an informative and simple website for this small company. The site allows potential customers to find information regarding the company and the services that they provide. I also worked with the company to improve their logo and establish a professional and informative brand.

The site is powered by PHP 5 and MySQL and runs on a bespoke content management system to allow the company employees to maintain the site in an easy to use environment.

Project: https://www.amberpublications.org.uk/manager/

Working for Staffordshire University I developed a child behaviour tracking and analysis system for CREC. The site is a unique web application that allows child behaviours to be tracked and improved throughout their time in nurseries, and is now used by any teachers who are involved in the CREC scheme. I worked with the client to tailor their specification and to thoroughly understand what they were trying to achieve, and then set about developing this complex and vast application.

The site is powered by PHP 5 and MySQL, and also features import and export functionality so data can be integrated with other systems. I enjoyed this project because it was so unique and also gave me the opportunity to build a system that could benefit thousands of young people in the future.

Project: http://www.willesley.org

I’ve been the Web Developer for Ashby & Coalville District Scouts for a few years now, and the website was due for a revamp, as well requiring a sophisticated backend to handle the administration of Willesley Campsite. The site features information on the district, the campsite, hosts mini websites for each group/unit in the district, as well as an entire booking system for the campsite.

This project took several months to complete, mainly due to the vastness and requirements of the campsite administration system. I did this project for free as a way of saying thank you for my years in Scouting and how it has improved my life.

Project: http://www.southeastscotlandscouts.org.uk

When The Scout Association reorganised their structure a few weeks ago, new websites were required for each of the regions. WebServ UK were called in to finish a half built design and convert it into a functioning Joomla template. Utilising XHTML, CSS and JavaScript technologies, the project was completed within a matter of hours.

Project: Escouts Route Hiker – A free to use website for planning and creating hikes for walkers in the UK.

Nearly five years ago I was doing the Duke of Edinburgh scheme through my school. When it came to creating the route cards for the hikes, our team got very frustrated and annoyed – if you make a mistake you have to go back and work out all the timings again. This sometimes resulted in spending hours on filling in the paperwork.

To solve this problem I created an Excel Spreadsheet. This basically worked out the timings automatically, and proved to be a huge success for our Duke of Edinburgh team. I had been part of the Escouts community for nearly a year at this point, and realised that others could benefit from using my spreadsheet. For this reason, I decided to make a small website with the same principle as the spreadsheet. With a huge amount of participation and ideas from the Escouts Community over the course of a year, the website went live, and has consistently grown in it’s usage over the last year. With 1039 users to date and no marketing done by myself, this project appears to have huge potential. For this reason I decided to turn the project into a company called ‘RouteHiker’, which will hopefully go live later this year.

Project: Posters suitable for exhibitions

In late 2007 I exhibited my company ‘RouteHiker’ at the Festival of Innovation, based at the NEC in Birmingham. To make my company stand out I enlisted the help of Liam Howley, a digital artist who I lived with in my first year at university. Liam is an extremely talented artist whose Photoshop skills never cease to amaze me.

Although the following isn’t my work, I thought it was so good I’d put it here for everyone to see. Liam produced 4 printable items – 1xA3 poster and 3xA4 posters, all of which work extremely well together and portray a powerful brand image.

Project: www.niran7.com

As a favour I turned my good friend Niran’s website design into a fully working site.

The site is powered by WordPress, with the site design running on a custom made theme. Niran supplied the Photoshop design of the site, and I converted this into a fully functioning site. The website also features some custom PHP such as the ‘Latest Work’ image on the homepage, which automatically reflects the latest work Niran has submitted to the site.

As always, it was a  pleasure to work with Niran, and gave some pleasing results. A fantastic site to show off Niran’s skill-set, and is definetely worth taking a look at!

Project: www.studentole.co.uk

As a client project for WebServUK, I created this unique website for Limehouse Services called StudentOlé. Taking several months to complete due to the vastness of the site, StudentOlé is basically a unique guide to check out what’s happening in your area. It features many elements includings guides to pubs and clubs, gigs and even plenty of money saving tips – perfect for students!

This project was quite a challenge, mainly because of the sheer vastness and brilliant number of ideas myself and Limehouse Services came up with. One of the biggest challenges was designing an efficient and normalized database, which is storing large amounts of information that users are entering onto the site.

WebServUK contracted my good friend Niran Vinod to do the graphic work for the StudentOlé project, and the results were fantastic, especially in the 40 page magazine he produced.

Overall, i’m glad I did this project, as Limehouse Services were a very creative and exciting team to work with, and the concept of the project had so much potential – taking the best elements of many popular sites including Facebook and MySpace. I think it’ll be interesting to see how the site kicks off, and I wish it every success!

Project: www.webservuksupport.com

To improve customer support and response times, I took it upon myself to build WebServ UK a functional and easy to use support site. The support website is split into 2 different sections: Helpdesk and Status.

The helpdesk section of the website is fairly straight forward from a programming point of view, and is a pretty standard helpdesk. When I’ve got time in the future, I’m looking to rebuild the helpdesk to include AJAX functionality, as to improve customer experience and usability. The helpdesk also features a knowledgebase, which contains hundreds of frequently asked questions by WebServ UK customers, with their corresponding answers. We’ve found that the knowledgebase has cut down support tickets and phonecalls by a huge 90%, so it’s definetely been worthwhile so far!

The status section of the website is a bit more complex than the helpdesk. It’s designed to allow users to keep track of the status of the services for which they have paid for, whether it be hosting, email or domains. Most server status scripts work by just pinging the port which the service to be checked operates on. However, I know that even if the port is active, the service might not be functioning correctly. For this reason I wrote a script which sits on all the WebServ UK servers, and checks each service in great detail, before sending a response to the support website. Although we’ve hardly had any downtime in the last year, when a service does go on the blink, we’ve found customers really appreciate being able to find out quickly exactly what the problem is, and when it is likely to be resolved.