Projects:

Sports Tours International -Inventive

This project involved the redesign of Sports Tours International (STI) website. STI offers information and event booking for sporting activities; cycling, running, triathlons and golf.
The new design went live in 2011. And moves the website from a dated 90's narrow newspaper column style layout to a much more vibrantly colored style, and one that is also wider and more fluid.
A criticism of the previous site was poor cross browser support, especially on mobile devices. The new site has been coded to valid HTML 5 and W3C standards, and has been extensively tested in all major desktop browsers (legacy IE 5.5/6.0, IE7, IE8, IE9, latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera) and mobile devices (iPad, iPhone 3G, iPhone 4/4S).
The backend is powered by Textpattern CMS, and features popular plugins and also some custom bespoke modifications.

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Sunquest Facebook App (Thomas Cook Canada) -Inventive

Sunquest is a Canadian brand of Thomas Cook. Like many companies they have recognised the importance of social media and advertising.
Work was commissioned on a Facebook Application in the mid-2010, with the Application finally going live at the start of 2011.
The App displays holiday packages taken from Sunquest's inventory, Facebook users search by price or destination. Users can then create their own holiday by uploading images and descriptions, and inviting their friends to come.
The driving principle is the more friends invited to party, the bigger the discount the users receive.
Users can also cast votes on their favourite holidays, the number of votes are shown as progress bars with discount milestones. The App is then spread virally through News Feeds, Wall posts and "Like" buttons.

I developed this Application using Facebook Markup Language (FBML), FBJS (Facebook JavaScript) and with the latest version of Facebook PHP SDK API. User details, holiday inventory and votes are stored in MySQL DB. In addition to the front end App, I developed a CMS solution which allows Sunquest staff to load inventory via XML Web Services, to edit holiday pricing and to track the progress of user's votes.

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RS Components Competitor Pricing System -Inventive

In addition to website building, I am also highly skilled in Screen Scraping.
RS Components are an electrical parts specialist, with a range of 10 million products.

I developed .Net/java applications which collect product details and prices from over 20 competitors in 15 international markets.
The applications can deal with different languages and local currencies, as well circumvent various blocking techniques such as IP blocking.
Collected data is stored, and later compared and matched using various normalization algorithms and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) fuzzy matching.
Margin and profit reports can be generated, allowing RS to track competitor prices and make intelligent price adjustments, ensuring they always have the competitive edge.

Scrape applications are written in a way that allows them to split into multiple concurrent threads, and run from multiple servers.
Parallelism makes it possible to return over 50,000 results per hour.
Utilising cloud services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides RS with the maximum throughput, performance and scalability.

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Hoseasons Competitor Pricing System -Inventive

I have also built Scraping modules for The Hoseasons Group, a specialist in holiday cottage rentals.
Screen scraping can be used to simulate mouse clicks and form submits and then extracts pricing data from the HTML/js/XML/AJAX.

For Competitor Websites a screen scraper session is invoked from a C# terminal application. Console apps can be setup as scheduled tasks to run at set intervals.
Scraped data is stored in MS SQL database tables. Parameters such as departure date and duration of nights can be set using a front end asp.net web application.
On completion of a scrape an email log is sent, Competitor data can then be queried and compared.

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Thomson Al Fresco -Inventive

Thomson Al Fresco is a holiday search and booking site, and once part of the TUI group.
The site is powered by Anite CMS, a highly bespoke CMS system which is used throughout the travel industry. It shares some similarities with XSL templating.
The site features many embedded YouTube holiday clips and integration with Trip Advisor.

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Red Sea Holidays -Inventive

Red Sea Holidays specialises in hotels and cruises in Egypt. It is another example of a travel website powered by Anite CMS. The site has recently under gone a complete reskin, which I played a major part in.
One of the perks of working on this project has been discounted trips to Egypt!

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Your Local Post Office -Inventive

Your Local Post Office is a run by the Federation of Sub-Postmasters. It is a place for the thousands of small local postoffices to create web presence for themselves, to uploaded branch details, local events, classified ads and create a 'shopping' area.
The site is based on Joomla CMS with bespoke PHP components. jQuery and Yahoo YUI handle a majority of the Javascript.

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AA Appointments -Inventive

AA Appointments is the largest international specialist travel recruitment agencies. The site is written in ASP classic and supports the uploading of CV's and email notifications to subscribed users.
My main role on this project was debugging, data collection, site reskin and upgrading CMS patches. In addition to integrating the ASP backend with Barclays ePDQ payment gateway.

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ClickPostcard -Inventive

A site which allows users to create their own perfect personalised postcards and ordering them to print, by uploading their own pictures and messages.
The site has a heavily Flashed based component, I was tasked with integrating the Flash with the PHP backend. Billing information is sent onto payment gateways, including PayPal and Google Cart.

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Inventive IT -Inventive

Whilst at Inventive I had the opportunity to work on both external client projects and internal company projects.

Inventive IT company website
Targeted at Multinational Corporate (MNC) and Enterprise level clients. The site portfolios the business and software solutions that Inventive delivers to the travel industry. I developed this PHP site, and have worked on many of the business projects mentioned on the site.
Manchester Web Design
Inventive's web development arm. Targeted towards web based clients. I also developed this PHP site and have worked on all of the websites in its portfolio.
Manchester Hotels
Provides quick search results for hotels in the Manchester area. The website retrieves hotels using the LateRooms affiliate's API and XML Web Services.

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Premier League Tickets -FWM

In 2009 whilst at FWM, I had the opportunity to work with the Premier League on their mini ticketing and fixture iframe site.
I worked on the backend CMS admin and emailing system.
I coded the weekly fixture email to be cross client compatible (Outlook 2000-2007, Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo mail) and also viewable via a normal browser. The email pulled in data from the CMS and third party XML feeds.

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Barclays fan of India -FWM

A competition site giving lucky winners the chance to be flown over from India to watch their favorite team. Working on my own on the project I coded all aspects of xHTML/CSS/JS/PHP/XSL/XML. The competition has since ended, but draw your attention to the gallery section, in particular the picture and video sections.

Users uploaded images and videos as a part of their entry.
Images were automatically resized and cropped.

Users could upload a number of video formats (wmv, avi, 3gp, mov) , these were automatically transcoded to flv for embedding. I created a password protected approval system for the client so only appropriate entries were displayed.

The site's round box design was achieved using a series of transparent PNG images and div boxes with borders. The boxes can be made to grow to accommodate larger content and still display correctly in IE6. The grass background will 'grow' to match any screen resolution.

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Clubcoors -FWM

A site exclusively for retailers of the Coors product range. I designed a PHP calendar and events section to help retailers prepare stocks for festival and holiday periods.


I created an admin so that users with no technical knowledge could add and maintain their own events.

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Carling -FWM

I worked in a team of seven developers on Carling whilst at FWM, working on numerous aspects of the site including competitions, emails and social networking features. My daily activities also included maintaining text and image content, bug fixing, page redirects as part of SEO, extraction and export of competition winners from databases to CSV.

I created a page for British Barley Farmers, a series of British Barley promotions and adverts. You may have seen these adverts on ITV Movies.

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Nationwide Football -FWM

Was also known by the names of Home Nations or Sponsored By You. A site with selected UK team news stories, pictures and videos.

I created the 2009 splash page. XML news stories are listed beside external Twitter and YouTube RSS feeds. The RSS are cached on demand on local servers to reduce overhead loading times. YouTube channel is cached for up to 60 minutes, whilst the Twitter tweets cache is refreshed once every 30 minutes. In the left corner is a simple Javascript countdown clock counting down to the 2010 world cup.

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4thegame -FWM

4thegame was a long-standing football fanatic's site which ran from the early 90's up until the end of 2009. Fans could read up on the latest news, gossip, comment on matches and view pictures and videos.
Much of the legacy code was table based. I was involved in re-skinning the site to give it a new look for the new football season.

The 'Today In Football' section was a rotating Javascript carousel of images which link through to internal and external news stories. A CMS was also created to allow non-technical journalists to keep the carousel and stories updated.
My weekly activities on 4thegame included general bug fixing, embedding Javascript and Flash adverts, adding Google analytics and other tracking code.
A couple football seasons ago I created a Firefox Toolbar using RDF and Ajax.
Though not part of my technical role I have had my 15 minutes of fame posing as a model for a mobile phone advert on the site.

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George Digweed -FWM

The official website of the multi-world and European clay pigeon shooting champion George Digweed.
This is the place to find all the latest information on George's career and ever-expanding trophy cabinet.
Complete with Twitter and YouTube feeds, as well as a Facebook Fanbox.
The site template is flexible and could be duplicated for other sporting heroes in the future.

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Buffet Metro

Website promoting Buffet Metro, Manchester's All You Can Eat Chinese Buffet.
Located in the heart of City center, Piccadilly Gardens, fully air conditioned and open 7 days a week.
Complete with galleries and image player.
I am the sole developer on this project, in addition to website maintenance I also provide EPOS, CCTV and in restaurant music solutions to Buffet Metro.

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Ming Dynasty

Website promoting Ming Dynasty, a local Chinese Takeaway.
An example of a completely flat bespoke HTML site.
I was the sole developer on this project, in addition to website maintenance I also provided technial support to Ming Dynasty's computers.