Clients / Projects

MichaelSpry.com is the online portfolio for freelance photographer Michael Spry. Michael has amassed a large portfolio of photographs and has a professional level subscription on Flickr. He needed to take his portfolio to the next level and wanted to use it to attract new business.
He has not got the time,skill or inclination to manually update his website code when ever he wants to add a new photo to his portfolio and he wants a quick and easy way to manage the site from anywhere that has an internet connection.
I built an administrative photo management backend for Michael which allows him to do the following tasks with absolutely no programming:

• Upload new photos to the site
• Add new galleries
• Add new clients
• Update the look and feel of the site
• Create extra pages such as a contacts page
• Optimise his site for search engines

In addition to building a photo management application I also worked closely with Michael to design the front end gallery. The design is very minimilistic as Michael wanted the photos to speak for themselves. It is optimised for search engine ranking and works across all main browsers.
It also has a lightbox feature which was customised specifically for this site.
This project uses AJAX / Javascript connected to ASP code and a SQL Server database for data manipulation. It is more than a website, it is a fully functioning web app.

The Farnborough Aerospace Consortium (FAC) is the largest aerospace trade association in the UK. They represent hundreds of aerospace companies ranging from small to medium size enterprises to aerospace Primes such as Boeing. I acted as lead programmer and IT project manager for a 2 year project for the FAC to build an online community where FAC members could build up a detailed company profile of their skills, capabilities and areas of expertise and use this to network and market themselves to the global aerospace community. Some active members of this online community include Boeing, Airbus, Universities (around the world), UK embassies in places such as Dubai as well as FAC member companies.

• Members create online profile
• Users search for companies
• Reporting Tools
• Members add capabilities
• FAC manage membership
• FAC prepare reports

My role was to provide the IT expertise for the entire project.
This meant that I was involved in the whole software project lifecycle including designing the system from scratch, choosing hardware and software configurations, designing the database and then coding the entire system (and then testing it).
I also took on the role of system evangelist and successfully promoted the application to a number of other trade associations (WEAF, Aerospace Wales, EEN) who all now use the system. This has increased the number of aerospace community members to well over 1000.

Wateraid

Wateraid was the client I did the most work for while at Ellipsis Media and I developed an application for them centered around the London Marathon.
Every year, hundreds of runners pledge their support for Wateraid and raise sponsorship from friends and family which they pledge to the charity. Wateraid wanted to provide these runners with a way to collect online sponsorship as well as give each runner a personal blog where they could update their friends with their progress during training. This was done by providing a dynamic section on the Wateraid website where runners could register for the service and would then be allocated a username and password. They used this to log into a backend system which allowed them to build up their blog as well as a button which allowed people to sponsor them online. This sponsorship module was connected to Worlpay and so sponshorship was collected in real time. Each runner could also log in and see who had sponsored them as well as send out personalised thank you emails.
This solution had two key benefits for Wateraid:

• Provided an incentive for people to choose Wateraid as their charity to support
• Made sure all sponsorship pledges were collected..in the past them amount pledged was always greater than the sum actually recovered

This project was written mainly in ASP and SQL Server and Wateraid considered it a major factor in boosting revenues for the 2004 London Marathon.

HQ Hair

HQ Hair is the biggest online hair and beauty website in the UK. I did a number of things on this site during my time at Ellipsis Media including being responsible for the "Ask Jayne" and the "Ask Jasmine" sections when I first started and during the second half of my time at Ellipsis I was given responsibility for reworking their entire checkout procedure. This is a high profile site and gave me valuable experience in e-commerce web development.

dotEditor

dotEditor is Ellipsis Media's in house content management system which they developed themselves. During my time their I was involved with helping to write code to optimise the product as well as write a number of key plugins.

dotMailer

dotMailer is Ellipsis Media's in house email marketing solution which they develpoed themselves. I helped write a number of enhancements to the system including an efficient way of filtering out duplicate emails and on the reporting modules.

dotGallery...coming soon