Website design, development & hosting

Key skills and values

  • building websites since the mid-1990s but familiar with latest best practice
  • search engine optimisation (URL structures, sitemaps, redirects, canonical URLs, Google Webmaster Tools, Analytics
  • understand importance of creating content for human consumption, not flooding search engines with keywords
  • experience with Google Adwords for paid search results
  • web standards: separating content, presentation and behaviour, using semantic code for accessibility
  • new technologies: all the key HTML5 tags and practices, CSS3 visual enhancements, web fonts, hCard/Calendar, microformats
  • media queries for compatibility with different mobile device sizes. Custom stylesheets for printing
  • protecting code against SQL injection and XSS (cross-site scripting)
  • encrypting sensitive pages (knowledge of SSL certificates) and importance of salted-hash for passwords, not storing in plaintext
  • content management, both bespoke handwritten systems and adapting commercial/open source products
  • server configuration: Apache modules, mail servers and web mail, domain name registration, control panels & actually running DNS servers
  • editing audio and video and encoding it in the correct formats for widest possible viewing on web

Please contact me for a free, no obligation quote.

Specific technical experience

  • HTML5 (hand coded throughout my career) and CSS3
  • handwritten simple unobtrusive javascript (manipulating the DOM etc.) & using jQuery and plugins
  • Programming and database design/management: PHP 5 (custom code & Codeigniter framework) and MySQL 5.
  • Apache 2 webserver configuration
  • Debian Linux installation/configuration
  • Vim (esoteric text editor)
  • Email servers: Postfix, Exim, Courier (multiple-domains, spam, virus protection and pop3/imap/ssl support), SPF
  • DNS - handling registrations and managing DNS records. Third-party services (123-reg, Zerigo)
  • Podcasting (full process from audio recording and editing to feeds, promotion and hosting)
  • Revision control: RCS and Subversion
  • Usage statistics (server based logfile analysis, Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.)
  • Live audio streaming (Icecast) and browser-based audio/video plugins/players.
  • Knowledge of Amazon Web Services (S3, Cloudfront, EC2)
  • FTP server configuration
  • Integrating with e-commerce gateways (Worldpay, Barclays ePDQ, Goemerchant, Sage Pay)
  • Website/server/network monitoring (Nagios and 3rd party services like Pingdom)
  • In the past: Realaudio/video (encoding/serving and markup), Perl and Perl Template Toolkit