A little about this site

The main purpose of this site was to give me a method of professionally advertising myself to potential employers. The site also gives a bit of background about me, as well as some information about my interests and hobbies.

I have included a small selection of my previous work, which should provide a glimpse of the level of work I am capable of.

My resumé / CV has existed in website form since 2006. It was born from the idea that a professional CV can only be two pages. “But there is so much more that I want to convey about myself” I said, and thus, I created this site. The original incarnation was incredibly plain, and while informative, had a series of problems. The largest of these was the visibility (on the web, with search engines like Google), and the inclusion of personal information such as my home address, email address, and other pieces of information. In the current technological climate, one can’t help but be aware of ‘identity theft’. To this end, I decided that my original approach needed scrapping, and all personal information about myself needed removing.

My primary focus when designing this new site, was visibility, ease of management, security, and scalability. I decided that instead of coding the site myself (which would have given me total control of my content, but at the expense of time), that I would opt for a CMS (Content Management System). Using a CMS would give me a operating-system independent way of managing the content, as well as give me a professional looking and easy to set-up website. The CMS I chose was WordPress. The selection process I went through was fairly straight-forward. Having used Drupal at work (and severely disliking the interface), and having experienced Mambo at home, I opted for WordPress. I had previously experimented with the CMS, and I had planned on using it for part of my contract work with VOME. I covered the problem of visibility thanks to a few plugins for WordPress, as well as creating the website with certain keywords, and with certain content on the homepage. The biggest problem that I faced was that of contactability, but with the possibility of keeping my email address secret and free from spiders, bots, and spam attacks. The answer to this was provided in the way of a contact form. The form (viewable under the ‘Contact’ heading), allows a potential employer / contractor / interested party to submit their details straight to me via my personal server, which packages the contact form contents into an email, and sends it to me. With the addition of Kapture (the text verification tool), I can stop almost all bots spamming my email address with useless content. To this date, I have never once received a spam email which originated from this website.