I graduated from Anglia Ruskin University with a first class degree in Enterprise Computing (Computer Science re-branded) in 2006. Since then I’ve gained experience and diversity programming a wide range of systems in PHP for various sources.

I started work after university as a one man IT Department for a company selling batteries via their OSCommerce website. This taught me how to deal with frameworks that others have contributed to and better debug broken code. OSCommerce, as you may well know is a rabbit warren of files and making changes to a shop behind installing the odd plugin is no small task! this job taught me a great deal about troubleshooting, being resourceful and vastly improved my communication and negotiation skills.

I left my job to work for the Visium Group (http://www.propertysecrets.net) in 2007 as a PHP Programmer. I spent most of my day extending and maintaining a bespoke PHP framework although with a shrinking team (Credit Crunch) my responsibilities stretched out a bit into server administration (Windows and Unix) and designing the systems before writing them. Although bad for the company, I considered this to be a good opportunity for me because my skills were being extended somewhat. I enjoyed my job at Visium solely because myself and the team had some say in the way the site worked. This developed a passion for improving sites and their usability. Some might call the things I suggest a little anal but for the most part I consider myself to be a creative mind for site improvement and ongoing administration.

Sadly on the 10th August 2009 the Visium Group commenced liquidation procedures. This left me jobless however rather helpfully I had already handed in my notice to leave. I now work as a freelance PHP Programmer whilst looking after my two children at home. I work with a regular number of clients who use me for anything from a sounding board for new site ideas to full implementation of sites. Thus far this has been enjoyable and fruitful!

I am now fully fledged and self employed as a website developer/consultant. I like to work with all sorts of people on all sorts of jobs. I find myself working with different systems these days and the challenge is a good one. I often spend my time clearing up after other coders before moving onto optimise sites for Usability. I mainly work with WordPress at the moment (for everything if I can get away with it!) because it’s incredibly powerful, has a fantastic theme and plugin API and is very user friendly for both me as a programmer and for the clients/end users.

One of my pet hates is being paid to write a site for which the clients will have no further control. This assumed system whereby a site is written and then remains static until someone like myself is, again, paid to make changes is obsolete and wastes a lot of money and time for everyone. I generally recommend WordPress or to my clients so that I can design a theme, set it up and train them in it’s usage. They can then edit the content to their hearts content therefore releasing any blocks on creativity and spurring their site/business forward (sounds tacky I know but it’s the truth)!

Otherwise I run this site (when I get time) and write/maintain a number of WordPress plugins to be freely released to the internet community (check out my downloads page or scan through my blog posts… plenty of freebees in there up for grabs. I often get questions and queries for a number of different and exciting projects sent to me and enjoy the challenge of solving them!