About Me

Photo of meI am a BSc (Hons) Web & Multimedia graduate who is passionate about building websites and applications that are both rich and accessible to all, utilising the latest standards and techniques available.

In my spare time, I also pursue interests in music and theology. I currently live in Northumberland and don't see myself moving away anytime soon. It really is the best place I've ever lived!

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SCHIN Ltd.

The Sowerby Centre for Health Informatics in Newcastle (SCHIN) is a not-for-profit organisation that started as a research department of Newcastle University. It specialises in finding new and innovative ways for utilising IT in promoting good health care.

NHS Appraisal Toolkit

Screenshot of the NHS Appraisal Toolkit website
Address:
https://www.appraisals.nhs.uk
Worked on:
February 2005 - Present
Technologies / applications used:
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ASP, SQL Server 2000, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator

Comments

  • You can click "login" and select the link to login as the Guest GP to view the actual screens of the application.
  • A large part of the user interface had already been set in place by the time I joined the NHS Appraisal Toolkit (ATK) development team. I can remember feeling somewhat dismayed to see that the site was heavily dependent on tables, frames and presentational markup - by this time I had become aware and more experienced in separating presentation from content for improved accessibility. However, over the last 18 months there have been significant changes made as a result of my input.
  • The first major piece of work undertaken was to perform an audit of the JavaScript used in the site and re-write code where necessary to ensure the site worked as well in Firefox as it did in Internet Explorer.
  • Within the team I was responsible for many changes at each tier of the application, ranging from designing a new set of icons for the help section of the site, to fundamental changes to the core database structure to allow for advanced new procedures such as dual sign-off of documents between appraisee's and appraiser's.
  • The most recent raft of changes has included re-writing the registration process from scratch to incorporate improved security measures as well as using Asynchronous JavaScript server-calls to remove the need to use <iframe>s to refresh sections of the page without posting back.
  • We would like to re-write ATK from scratch in ASP.NET, and had started doing so with some features of the site, but unfortunately the funding has been cut for further development work. This means that ATK must remain as a classic ASP application that uses frames.

PRODIGY Knowledge

Screenshot of the PRODIGY website
Address:
http://www.prodigy.nhs.uk
Worked on:
October 2005 - Present
Technologies / applications used:
XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, ASP.NET 1.1 & 2.0, SQL Server 2000, XML, Visual Studio 2003 / 2005, Photoshop, Illustrator

Comments

  • This was a brand new project with no previous versions to contend with. This allowed us to develop a fresh user interface utilising some of the key web standards and accessible development techniques.
  • The system is an n-Tier, object-oriented project implemented in .NET with an SQL Server 2000 database.
  • I was particularly responsible for developing part of the presentation tier in ASP.NET with C# being used to code presentation logic. The initial phase of the site was implemented in ASP.NET 1.1, but a subsequent release updated this to be implemented in ASP.NET 2.0.
  • To overcome the limitations in templating available in ASP.NET 1.1, I developed a templating system that functioned remarkably similiarly to ASP.NET 2.0's master pages only without the WYSIWYG view. The similarity lay in that only the unique page content was stored in the individual .*.aspx files, with the overall visual framework residing in a custom class derived from System.Web.Ui.Page that the *.aspx's then in turn inherited from.
  • Although I was free to develop a user interface that adhered to web standards and accessibility guidelines, there was a slight spanner in the works. Each page of the portal section of the site has content that is directly exported from a content management system into the database to be incorporated into the page at run-time. Unfortunately, the markup emitted by the CMS was not anywhere near semantic, preferring to use constructs such as <div class="p">, rather than simply use <p>, as well as importing invalid CSS rules as inline styles. Sadly we have been unable to get around this issue, which does somewhat mar the resultant XHTML, but it does at least still validate!