Development Experience

I've been interested in web development since the web became popular and taught myself HTML in about 1995. I created my first website in 1999 and even registered my own domain. After discovering that the company website didn’t work in one of the most popular browsers, I was given the role of webmaster, taking the layout from professional designers and converting them into a working sales site. As the company expanded, the webmaster role was outsourced to an external company, but I was still working extensively on both the HTML help and a small customer portal, something which lead directly to my involvement in the creation of a new customer site that provided news, training information and demonstration videos. The initial idea was to develop the site using the same Mediawiki software that supports Wikipedia, but it rapidly became apparent that the site would also require the ability to store content in PDF format. Using a combination of the Sphinx search engine, a custom MySQL database and my own PHP code, I was able to create a seamless search experience for the site. I based the look and feel on a publicly available "skin", replacing the original code-heavy template with a simplified version that allowed me to create the design using Dreamweaver, using placeholders that could be replaced with the wiki content on the live site.

When the customer site was redesigned, I replaced the template with a version that included a modern layout containing drop-down menus and transparent rollover effects, taking images created by a professional web designer and converting them into a functional and highly effective website. I took care to ensure that the site worked well on both a standard PC and on mobile devices, creating the appropriate media queries to cover the standard display formats.

My next project was to create a simple pay-per-view portal to provide on-demand training material for our customers. Access to the site was locked down using Windows security, and the payment was processed from the corporate website. My own role was to develop the code required to authenticate each viewing request and to restrict the playback between a range of dates or for a selected number of times. I handled the video playback using some custom Flash code using HTML5 video as the fall-back. I dealt with the authentication using a MySQL database and streamed the video using some custom PHP which read the file from the server and displayed it using a custom HTTP header. I also created a small web page for the administrator that allowed them to generate an authenticated link and email this to the customer.

A few years later, I worked as the technical developer of our corporate intranet based on Sharepoint, creating custom code which provided drop-down menus, fixed table headings and intelligent forms. The development work made extensive use of Jquery and used AJAX to read information from the Sharepoint API. I was also required to lock down the Sharepoint user-interface so that unnecessary icons were hidden from the general users. My solution was to create code that loaded different CSS files depending on the users' access rights and to add additional CSS to hide the icons that weren't required. I learned a lot during this process as the Sharepoint CSS files have little publicly available documentation and I was forced to discover the settings myself using the browser’s developer functionality.