When I started out in digital, there was no distinction between the roles that people played, there was just the guy who made the website. Because of that grounding, throughout my career, I’ve always been able to code the UX and designs I create.
I have many years of experience creating responsive websites which respond to screen size, browser type, and operating system capabilities. Design is in part visual, in that it is important to understand what something will look like, but more so functional in that how something will work in different environments and on different devices is crucial.
I believe that the Functional Specification is part of the design process. A Functional Specification should describe how a website will work, rather than just how it will look.
I’ve always considered that the speed of interactions are an important part of a user’s experience, and the Functional Specification is where I detail how these will meet a project’s brief.
An example of my Functional Specification documentation can be downloaded below. This example allowed the project team to gain client approval before development commenced, and was a reference point for a 10-strong development and testing team.
In the same way that creating visual guides is a part of a design process so understanding, at times defining, and always maintaining a conistent tone of voice is vital to the success.
I’ve written copy, micro-content and maintained a style of writing on a great many projects and created Tone of Voice document for Freemans Grattan Holding’s DD Track+.
I’ve professional experience using Figma, Sketch, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
I’ve used all the flavours of HTML since the late 1990s, and I write my HTML code by hand in text editors which helps me create semantic code. At the moment, I use Sublime Text to code but I can use anything.
I’ve used CSS for over twenty years.. When I started using CSS it was a very limited technology, and as it grew I’ve continued to introduce new elements as they were released in CSS 3, and now CSS 4 as they’ve become stable.
I have extensive experience of CSS and CSS 2.1, and am able to code stylesheets by hand. This gives me an understanding of how declarations impact each other, and how to structure a CSS file which allows other people to understand it, and work with it.
I’ve used both LESS and Sass on larger CSS projects in collaborative environments. I’ve used CoffeeScript for doing similar with JavaScript.
Professionally, I’ve used Grunt and Gulp to create pre-processing batch jobs as well as standalone pre-processors.
I’ve used JavaScript since the start of my career.
I’ve used JavaScript to create single page applications and have experience using frameworks such as Ext JS, Knockout, angularjs, and backbone.js.
I’ve been using jQuery since before the 1.0 release. I have experience with jQuery Mobile, JQWidgets and jQuery UI.
I use jQuery for most of my websites, and have used it professionally for over ten years. I appreciate jQuery because I previously had to write my own API which was challenging and not always fit for purpose.
There didn’t use to be a distinction between front end and back end coding when I first started in the digital industry, there were simply tasks which needed to be completed in order to make a website work. From a development perspective, I lean towards what is now known as as front end. but I have abilities on the back end too.
At the moment I use Sublime Text to code, but I can use anything.
I have a wealth of experience using Wordpress as a publishing platform. I’m able to write themes and plug-ins, and have done both professionally. I’ve also been able to adapt Wordpress as a platform for a social network using BuddyPress, as well as a client facing content management system without utilising the blogging capabilities.
Recently I used Wordpress for Provident Financial Group for their Satsuma Squeeze website, and at University of Leeds for their Toolkit documentation.
I use Wordpress for my own website BfB, which has utilised the platform since the very earliest releases.
I’ve got over ten years of experience working with PHP. Much of that come in the form of writing Wordpress themes and plug-ins.
I’ve experience using the pre-.NET ASP code to create websites. Classic ASP, as it is now known, is rarely used.
I’ve got a lot of experience interfacing back end systems with the front end using XML and JSON.
I’ve used XSLT/XML to create a HTML publishing system written in PHP which allowed a client to create free-standing HTML pages from a set of templates defined in XSLT.
