Portfolio
Nothing happens in a vacuum, and my work is no exception. Whilst I have access to many excellent people for projects, much of my work is performed as part of larger teams. The following represents a sample of this work.
British Red Cross, 2008 - 2009
Over 3000 employees and 30,000 volunteers, all with different needs from an intranet that was not up to the job. The aim of this job with the Usability Lab was to sort out more than 3500 items of content into a new structure. To understand the IA and users needs focus groups and card sorting was used. I also had to develop a new online tool in order to perform a card classification test, a slight variation of a card sort.
The tough part of this job was actually sorting out 3500 items. Even at 1 minute per item that is almost 10 days of solid categorisation. And that would be at a serious pace. For the task I developed another tool that would let work at this speed. In this case the idea was to quickly present the content and past the relevant information into OmniOutliner, which was used to manage the IA build.
International Network of Street Papers, 2008
INSP support and represent nearly 100 street papers around the world. They came to to Curious Group to provide them with a new image for their main information portal. I was contracted with Curious and created the build for the site in SilverStripe. The site includes many tools for INSP's members, such as ability to upload details of latest issue, current campaigns, internships and jobs, newsletters and a resource exchange.
SPARC Europe, 2007 - 2008
Working with the wonderful TBI Communications I helped to create the SPARC Europe portal. SPARC presented a unique opportunity to create a site that would support a complex message targeted towards many disparate audience needs. I was instrumental in providing the team with an understanding of the various audiences and unique communications solutions to support clear and consistent presentation of brand and message.
Technically, the site was not too shoddy either, I built this using the powerful Plone CMS, also creating the HTML and CSS build.
Britannia Building Society, 2007
How do you organise over 10,000 items of content for a widely diverse group of users? That was the problem that Britannia Building Society faced when confronted with a rebuild of their intranet. Working with Usability Lab I had to help out with this daunting task. My role was to develop top two levels of the IA, wireframe some new user experience concepts and test these with some of the users.
As with any good IA redevelopment we started with the users and carried out a series of card sorting exercises and focus groups to understand how the many different parts of the organisation thought about the intranet and what their needs and goals were. The information from these exercises informed the development of the IA and a series of guidelines for use in developing subsequent areas.
AfricaNow, 2007 - Present
I stepped in to help the award winning Africa Now when they were let down and left with a design but no code. I created the HTML and CSS and went on to provide them a CMS using Catalyst for Perl sitting on a SQLite3 database and using Markdown to allow them reasonable editing facilities.
Thinking that it is was a shame to leave them with quite a technical approach to their content management, I have recently begun moving them over to using the SilverStripe CMS.
PedJobs, 2006-2007
This was a fairly straight forward accessibility conversion. They gave me an interesting chuck of HTML and designs and I returned some beautifully crafted HTML/CSS that is nice and accessible.
I also spent a fair amount of time with the people at PedJobs, coaching them in accessibility issues and writing for the web.
Oxford Journals, 2005
Oxford Journals manages nearly 200 highly respect journals. I had the pleasure to work as the Technical Team Leader for a few years and then as a freelancer. This work involved the day-to-day management of a large complex website and supporting intranet, selection and deployment of a new CMS, rebuild and integration of site in line with new brand and a full e-commerce system to manage journal subscriptions. I was also able to actively promote usability and accessibility throughout the team and with almost 100 content administrators.
The site itself was built on top of the Bricolage CMS, which is built using the excellent HTML::Mason Perl library. The website build made extensive use of CSS, particularly the Cascading part. There was also a need to integrate the whole build with HighWire Press who manage all the journal content hosting.