I recently built the frontend & Wordpress backend for Cherished Trinkets, a handmade jewellery shop & blog; beautifully designed by Mark.

Web designer Magazine contacted Mark as they had seen the site and wanted to feature it in a “web workshop” section of the magazine.

The article gives practical advice to help people create some of the elements on the homepage including the drop down menu’s and javascript image viewer. Also features a short interview with Mark about the design and some great comments on the site design and functionality :)

I was lucky enough to work on the Emma Watson official site along with my colleges at great fridays, Manchester.  I worked on the front end,  XHTML slideshow & dynamic page scaling/re-sizing.

The site was greatly received by all the Emma fans with thousands of messages in the first few days of going live. Although the site is primarily XHTML we submitted to FWA and after a week of public voting, Emma Watson has made it to the public short list! Very exciting stuff,  for more info view the site on FWA here :)

The first was the Sh! Awards held in Leeds and organised by the media agency Brahm. The competition was open to all students in North England University’s. I was chosen as a finalist and required to give a 60 minute presentation and Q&A session with some well respected, new media experts. A week later I was at the awards night, for some celebrations & to collect 2nd place in the Digital Media category. The award was for a collection of work from my final year, including my final year project – The Photo Guide and my photography project Poverty of the Mind.

Me presenting work at the BBC North Design Awards 2009

The second awards night was the Northern Design Awards sponsored by the BBC. Over 3000 students from University & Colleges across the UK entered and I was chosen as a finalist in the Digital Media category. My project Poverty of the Mind wasn’t a winner on the night but I enjoyed attending such a large event, presenting my work and socialising. I also managed to sneak onto BBC 1 news!

There’s a video of the evening on Youtube, check it out.

Finally I attended an awards night at the University of Huddersfield where I picked up 1st place for best use of Visual Design again for my Poverty of the Mind project. I also won second prize for technical achievement, this was for a destop application mashing up web services – build with Adobe Air.

The Photo Guide is my final year project; a community driven, portable photography guide for digital SLR camera users. I was fully responsible for everything from the design, time management, content, frontend (html, css, javascript) and backend (php). It was in development for around 3 months and accompanied by a 12000 word dissertation.

The site makes use of a wide variety of open source technologies, including: Wordpress, JQuery, Google Maps API, TinyMCE, Gravatar and Smart image resizer. I also created a mobile version of the site:

The mobile site can be seen by accessing the site while on a mobile device (such as the iPhone)! It features less functionality than the full site but gives quick and easy access to personalised guidebooks containing guides saved for quick reference when needed most – out taking photos.

Using a series of five images for a online social experiment titled ‘Poverty of the Mind’ to raise awareness and offer support to people with mind poverty. The images use a minimal and saturated style manipulated to look like scenes from an office workers bad day. The style is consistent throughout the series. The expressions and negative body language of the main subject helps to show his state of mind and feelings about his current work situation.

Real life content from the social networking site Twitter has been dynamically overlaid onto the images to give a narrative and help people connect with the subject. I added icons to add extra value to the images and re-enforce his thoughts in a quirky way.

Filler images and lines have been used to connect the series and keep the flow between them. A few common themes including time and repetitiveness are also used to connect the images.

I have kept the project simple and focused on a story in an attempt to raise awareness of what can be a tragic situation for those involved, I hope people can draw something positive from my project either on a creative level or a reminder to peruse their happiness and not to get stuck in a job they don’t like.

A web development project built using asp.NET. The brief was to create a fully functioning, database driven ticket booking service for a made up theatre company. Detailing all shows, venues, cast, productions and performances, the ability for customers to register then book tickets and for admin to add/maintain all content.

As well as simply viewing all the normal theatre content, the site has the following functionality:

• Full admin controls for updating all content and adding new content
• Booking system, and ticket availability checker
• Order history and ticket cancelation
• Dynamic cancelled performance and production notification

The design was created by me and the following technical functionality has been used:

• Themes and skins for styling and managing Controls, Menus, Login and Images
• User controls (for the promo boxes), a master page, several content place holders
• AdRotator driven by XML for the large promotion banner on the homepage
• Login control with LoginView and role groups for three types of members, all with different access levels
• Validation (regular expression, required field, range validator)
• Dynamic drop down list creation and manipulating data using standard form controls (check box, text input, DDL)
• Step wizards for registering and updating passwords
• Role based access to admin sections and different options on pages for individual roles
• Repeaters, Grid views, Form views, Custom data forms for inserting new data
• Data bind, database queries, session variables etc in code behind
• Fully commented code
• Cross browser compatible (ie6, ie7, safari, Google chrome, Firefox 2, Firefox 3)
• Dynamic page titles
• Complex data binding for ddl when updating / creating new shows/members/run/productions etc

The site is not live as I cannot host it.

Ebay make the shops fool proof and ‘easy’ for shop owners to add brand identities and style, it’s understanding as the appeal of Ebay trading is that anyone can do it no matter what their business background or web development knowledge. However Ebay make it extremely hard for web developers to customize beyond this and to make shops attractive and unique is a challenge.

I had 24 hours of free time on this project so I worked through the night on a design and began implementing it on the Ebay shop. The only place Ebay allows developers to insert HTML or any code is in the header, so I created an external style sheet that contained CSS to style all the basic assets in a shop – items, categories, the Ebay frame, search boxes, etc. I then created a custom header to make the shop look more like a typical website and less like a standard Ebay shop, I wanted to improve the customers experience and make their visit more pleasant and efficient to benefit both the customer and my client.

Unfortunately Ebay shop frames and all their components are created using hundreds of nested tables with very few unique classes or ID’s so styling is not for the faint hearted or un-experienced.
My results can be found here: (link to Settle Down Books) and early results are promising sales are at a high for early January!