World Horse Welfare

I have worked for World Horse Welfare for over 15 years. I initially started working with them in my very first developer role, employed by a past company. After going freelance in 2012, I carried on working with them and am now lead web developer working alongside their in-house project manager.

They have always been a progressive organisation on the technology front - largely due to their Head of IT, Dale Gedge. Their current website is the tip of a large platform that is mostly unseen to the public. It includes a backend admin system and integration into a spread of other interconnected technologies used for managing other aspects of the charity.

The project was, and is, an ongoing team effort starting life on paper with UX wireframes and designs done by Manchester based designer Simon Marshall. My team, working along side fellow freelance frontend developer James Evers-Swindell, then brought the designs to life.

Magenta Skateboards

Magenta Skateboards is a French Skateboard and clothing brand established by former pro Skateboarder, Vivien Feil. Along with many brands, Magenta Skateboards operate as a distributor, wholesaler and retailer. Having tried (and failed) several times to find an off-the-shelf solution, they decided to invest in a bespoke platform to better fit their business model. They were put in touch with me by one of my other customers who operated in the same industry.

Vivien speaks great English, having learned through gaming and travel during his time as a professional boarder. The spec was complicated. The software had to handle three distinct customer types, with different pricing for distributor, wholesale and retail customers. On top of this, it had to deal with different VAT and shipping models for customers around the world.

There were certainly moments when I thought it was too big a project for my small team. That in mind, I persuaded Vivien to do the project in stages over a couple of years. The first version was designed to deal with the wholesale and retail side of the business. We then phased in features for his distributor customers over subsequent versions.

Bristol Short Story Prize

The wonderful Bristol Short Story Prize is an international writing competition based in Bristol. Along with the competition, it also publishes an annual anthology of the best entries to promote the stories and writers as much as possible.

I built the first version of the website when it launched in 2007. At that point it was just a Wordpress website with a custom plugin for entering the competition. Since them it has had several rebuilds, most recently as a Laravel project.