My Skills and Experience

One of my particular strengths is project management. Because of my development background, I have a better understanding of most of the technical processes that are required for a project.

I have successfully project managed countless projects including systems for local councils (Leicester County Council and Blaby District Council)

I have managed teams creating e-commerce solutions for high street companies such as Matalan and Machine Mart, through to small yet complex digital projects for law firms, stock brokers and financial institutions. 

I believe that successful projects stem from a foundation of planning, testing, reporting, and learning (very much the agile approach) with an attention to detail throughout and utilising Scrum and Kanban methodologies as well as team management software such as Azure DevOps, Zoho Project, Jira, Teams, and Slack.

I have worked with various project management tools including Microsoft Project, Zoho Project Management, Monday.com and even various collaborative tools such as Microsoft Teams, Slack and Google Apps for smaller companies and projects that don't have access to enterprise tools.

I have developed with Microsoft technologies since 1991 where I built applications in Visual Basic 3, through to classic ASP, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft .net and now working with the multi-platform .net core framework and Xamarin.

I have developed many different types of projects from Games (started developing at the age of 15 writing 8-bit games in machine code for the Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64), Multimedia CD-Roms for BM and Sky, conversion and parsing apps for consumer data, mobile apps for both iOS and Android and of course involved in the development of numerous web sites for household names such as Santander, Alton Towers and Matalan.

My preferred CMS platform for website creation is Umbraco but have experience in Ektron and even built my own content management system used for years by companies such as Pace and Phaidon.

Search Engine Optimisation is at the heart of every website project I work on. Every site requires a solid SEO grounding to get off the ground and to provide the most cost-effective method of gaining traffic!

Everything from making sure that a website code is technically sound, to providing all the necessary building blocks and guidelines for how content should be written

Inbound link building should be negotiated and navigation structure should be easy to follow.

SEO is a methodical process, with a need for constant attention and should rarely be implemented in a "Quick Win" fashion. Using my knowledge, backed up with industry-standard tools, I have produced SEO implementations for hundreds of clients to achieve ranking success. If you don't know why your site isn't performing, then it's well worth a chat!

I’ve worked on many high-visibility social media, PPC and email marketing campaigns To help previous clients, I developed a tool called MailManager which was an email marketing and management tool which was used by Alton Towers, Machine Mart, Staff Bay and Phaidon Books.

My system would automatically manage unsubscribes, hard and soft bouncebacks and email replies. It would automatically generate all the analytics and reports required for the broadcast. My achievements, along with the teams I managed include taking Alton Towers’ unique visitors from 3 million to 11 million over a four-year period as well as growing their Facebook follower count to over a million within a year and having similar success with Matalan starting with a base of just 30k.

I’ve designed and built successful Christmas campaigns for shopping centres and of course, created content and systems to capture and manage customer details for a multitude of sites. I’m also fully versed in third-party email management tools such as Mailchimp and SendinBlue as well as social media management tools such as Semrush and Hootsuite.

Throughout the years I have worked with Girobank, Alliance and Leicester and Santander, designing the processes and developing secure bill payment systems for hundreds of services including gas and electric companies and numerous local governments.

As Technical Director, I managed the development team for Santanders’ international payment product and was paramount in making sure that the systems and processes we were developing were FSQS accredited. I’ve managed the integrations of payment gateways from Worldpay, Stripe, Elevon, SagePay and PayPal to name a few. All integrated within websites, back office systems and even mobile apps.

As previously mentioned, I have worked within financial systems since they entered the web foray and have always had security at the heart of everything I have achieved. Fully versed in development security such as Cross Site Scripting, SQL injection and hashing/encryption and took my last company through the government’s cyber essentials plus accreditation as well as arranging performing training for GDPR and fraud detection and prevention.

I am experienced in the creation of a whole range of technical documentation. Previous examples have been technical specifications, detailed database and network designs, policy documents, API documentation, systems flows, UAT documentation, brief responses, website structure documents, sales and marketing documents and user manuals. I’m fully at home with Visio, Google Docs, Microsoft Project, Excel and of course Word. I am sure there’s nothing you’d need to document that I haven’t already documented at some point in my career

It's very obvious that for every accessibility feature you ignore, you alienate a small but potentially crucial part of your audience. For example, there are a number of guidelines regarding text readability and colour contrast. ignoring these guidelines could be making your site hard or unusable for the 3 million people in the UK who suffer from colour blindness. Let's not forget the older generation and those who are not able to see the small print on your site because you cannot zoom the text. I am passionate about this, especially where services are provided by a site or there are interactive functions that you want your users to provide.

I have provided reports and implemented changes on many sites including ones for Blaby District Council and West Yorkshire Combined Authority. I also love the fact that making your site accessible for your users, means the site is more accessible for search engines, and you know what that means... Better rankings!