Alex Hall

I build helpful user experiences for the web. I am an easy to work with, friendly guy.

Education

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  • University Of Central Lancashire

    2005-2007
  • Web & Multimedia with Business Information Systems

Although I didn't complete this course because of the direction it took, during the time I was at the University I learnt a great deal about the front end development of websites, including the way they are coded and the way they are built. In my business information systems course I also learnt the way companies use systems to function more efficiently and dynamically.

I also took away plenty of design experience in how to use various programs such as the Adobe Creative Suite to help design websites from their pre-production state, to them being built in code.

The Henley College is a premier sixth form provision in the Thames Valley and specialises in providing an excellent 16 - 18 education. During my time their I studied a range of academic courses including Geography, Psychology, Biology, Maths, French and English as well as study in the Theory Of Knowledge.

Experience

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YourSiteAdmin is a Content Management System (CMS) written by me to cater for the needs of some of my clients. I have never used Wordpress as I enjoy writing my own management systems but realised that I was writing the same code over and over again. YourSiteAdmin was an amalgamation of the work put into two separate sites at the time and has since grown exponentionally.

The CMS currently manages the content for about 5 up-and-running sites. More are on the way and the site itself is growing everyday. If you'd like us to host your site then please get in contact and we'll be able to give you a quote and a more comprehensive view of the features we can offer. If we don't currently offer it, rest assured, it can probably be added no problem!

The future of the project sees an API that can eaily be integrated with. If you manage your own site, or have your own hosting and just require somewhere to manage your content, we'll have you covered for that too! We're also looking at adding some templates in the future so you can build your own site from the ground up the way you want.

Colonel DLL is the new band spawned from the remnants of Syst3m 32. I decided to try something different with the design of this site because I had recently been reading about sites that used just one page to show all information with a navigation that allowed you to jump down the page to the various sections. In keeping with the guitar theme I decided to build the site around a huge guitar template.

It still requires a lot of work as I've tried to use a background image in the form of a guitar amp to give the site some perspective, but as yet the finer details aren't quite there. However, I alos built a calendar system that allows people to add events to a calendar in order to select days for events, gigs and practices that can be seen by all. There is a lot of JavaScript and Ajax involved to achieve this.

Whilst working for BT Customerstreet one of the projects I was involved in was the rebuild of the btexchanges website, which was in dire need of an upgrade! We went through varous stages of user testing and it was up to me and two others to rebuild the site, from scratch, to what it has become today with primary focus on the user experience of the website.

It was a huge project for three people but was completed on time, and it was the first time I'd delved into namespacing javascript and looked at minification, and concatenation of JavaScript and CSS to help speed up the page. In fact this project led me to go back to my old sites and speed them up by putting the various practices from YSlow (a Firefox page speed addon) at the forefront of the sites.

DeVSeO is the my most successful and main website that I have developed personally. It started out as an idea between myself and a friend, that idea being that I would talk about the latest development issues/articles and he would discuss SEO (hence the name 'DeV'|'SeO'). However, it has mostly been left up to me and I recently decided to redesign the website to look a little bit more like I know what I'm doing! I've never boasted to be a great designer but was very proud of the outcome, which now has two style variations.

DeVSeO is all about helping people wth various aspects of SEO and development by way of providing tools and articles around the subjects. The tools mainly focus on SEO, allowing people to see (for free!) how their site is likely to rank in the SEO's based on various factors.

Sys3tm 32 were the band I was in at the time of building the site and was my first commercial experience building a site. It had plenty of functionality for the band members including the ability to add and edit tabs and lyrics, send privates, send E-Mails and organise gigs, events and practices that were available to the other band members and the general public so they knew where we were playing.

This was also the first time I delved into using JavaScript for web development, including using ajax for various tasks. I like to think of this site as my learning curve into the web design and development industry.

  • Photoshop

    • Experience - years
    • Last Used -
  • 80%

  • (X)HTML / CSS

    • Experience - years
    • Last Used -
  • 98%

  • HTML5 / CSS3

    • Experience - year
    • Last Used -
  • 80%

  • jQuery - Javascript Library

    • Experience - year
    • Last Used -
  • 90%

  • YUI - Javascript Library

    • Experience - year
    • Last Used - 2011
  • 60%

  • Thanking everyone!

    • Experience - ~20 years
    • Last Used - Just Used :)
  • 100%

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