Simon Dean - Website Developer

Simon Dean

Website Developer

Website Developer
One of my many talents, is as a website developer. In my previous job, I developed my employers website based on their marketing literature. My knowledge is self taught by cannibalising other websites usually, and learning the synopsis of HTML and PHP from the relevant sources. There are so many great websites out there that it is so easy to learn what you need.

I believe in this instance, that my talents (more so than my experience) will speak for itself. So here, are some websites that I have developed:

HCCM - The website I developed for HCCM (its currently under redevelopment and may disappear any time soon.

Blargle - My original main personal website. I realised that all good websites needed a theme, and I developed something unique and unusual - a teletext theme. The site started off life originally as a college project called intertext. I introduced an even greater teletext feel, then realised it wouldn't sell. So I added more colour, more personalisation, and have ended up with the result that you see here.

Celebrity Researcher - Starting off life as Glorious Gilbert, I wanted to expand the idea to cover more celebrities. As usual, the bigger the website, the less personal it is and almost the more generic it becomes. I feel I have made a grave error. Still, I have developed all the PHP programming and behind the scenes databases, even synchronising PHPBB2 to my own login system that I developed. It's going to require many years to complete.

Cube One - I wanted to setup at being self employed to give myself some business credentials and to say that I have commercial experience in website development. Unfortunately circumstances have conspired against me to stop me from doing this at the moment. Maybe once I get a job I can then be self employed too.

PolyRingers - I want to have another business and distribute polyphonic ringtones. This site is in initial development. I have a domain name lined up, its own webspace, and Im slowly building the backend programming in PHP with databases. If only I can get a ringtone license. Does anyone have ś500 to invest?

As you can see from this array of websites, I am very versatile. I build my sites from scratch using mainly the MS-DOS editor. So I am conversant with HTML. In recent years I have become familiar with PHP (which is sooo much easier than Perl) and MySQL, although in my past experience I have used Java, JavaScript, SSI and Perl. I am somewhat of a traditionalist, and do not believe in Java and JavaScript since they rely too much on the browser and many times, developers only build their sites for one particular browser - that's usually Internet Explorer. I believe any programming required should be done as much as possible on the server. However with modern browsers, we do not have that concern too much anymore, but I am a firm believer in constant testing and ensuring all browsers display the webpage the same way.

In developing a website, I usually develop my theme in a graphics package and then produce the HTML required from that design. I consider myself to be a very flexible developer who is never afraid of a challenge.