Portfolio

Here are some projects that I’ve personally developed and delivered:

MNA Research

MNA Research website developed using WordPress for the Midlands News Association Marketing Team.

I worked with graphics artist Russ James to develop a visually striking website for advertising professionals wanting to advertise in Midland News Association publications (e.g. Express & Star, Shropshire Star newspapers).

Weather Pages

Weather pages for www.expressandstar.com/weather and www.shropshirestar.com/weather.

I worked with graphics artist Soeli Thomas to transform an XML feed from NetWeather into daily and weekly weather forecasts.

The weather forecasts became an instant success and are a popular part of the websites.

The XHTML file caching I developed between automated XML feed reading easily serves the traffic.

Star Group Pension Scheme

Star Group Pension Scheme website developed using WordPress for Star Group (Claverley Group Ltd.).

I worked with graphics artist Darren Price to develop a visually mature website for stakeholders in the company pension scheme.

I also worked closely with the chairman of the Star Group Pension Scheme Staff Committee on how best to present and update the information on the website.

House Adverts OpenX Solution

Delivered a new House Adverts (website advertising space managed and sold directly by the Midlands News Association) solution for www.expressandstar.com and www.shropshirestar.com.

I ran the upgrade project of the House Adverts, which comprised of setting up a new powerful adverts server (Apache, PHP, MySQL, XCache) running OpenX and optimizing the integration of the adverts using JavaScript.

The new OpenX system I delivered eliminated a huge performance bottleneck of the web servers making many requests per page to the old advert system by calling advert data in only once per page.

Result: all the web and database servers did less and everything’s faster.

XCache Deployment

Deployed XCache (PHP code acceleration) across all the web servers I ran at MNA Digital.

I installed and ironed out initial variable caching problems on the web server for the highest traffic site, www.expressandstar.com.

Through monitoring and tuning I turned round an overloaded web server by quadrupling its performance and making it capable of handling traffic spikes, with additional benefits of reduced load on its database server.

The project was such a success that I soon deployed XCache across all the web servers.