Alex Finney

McCann Erickson

Web Developer

My job role at McCann consists of a mixture of server side and front end development for a range of clients including AXA (www.axawealth.co.uk), HiQ (www.hiqonline.co.uk), Brut (www.brutformen.co.uk) and G Plan Upholstery (www.gplan.co.uk) among others.

Interesing and/or fun tasks include:

• Adding Google places API integration, Google's Geocoding API for address lookups and server caching of information to limit API requests and ensure high performance;

Problem Free

Web Developer

Problem Free primarily provides online survey, poll and quiz services, these being booroo (www.booroo.com) and free online surveys (www.freeonlinesurveys.com).

My work at Problem Free has included:

• Designing and building a tool for creating reports based on data collected via quizzes. The tool allows the user to add charts displaying different aggregates of data, as well as headings, text and data grids which can be resized and moved around 'pages' to create the report;
• Updating areas of booroo.com to create a better display of information and/or user interaction with the addition of neater design, jquery and ajax;

Brightpearl

Web Designer

Brightpearl is an innovative and unique company providing a web-based system for accounting, CRM, stock control, invoicing and online shop for small businesses.

My work at Brightpearl has included:

• Designing and building the Brightpearl corporate website for US audiences for the progression into the US market, heavily focusing on SEO for maximum visibility. Built using wordpress for ease of changing and to make use of wordpress' quick set-up time and automatic SEO features (the design has since been updated);
• Designing bespoke websites for clients, built using Brightpearl's template/theming system;
• Designing and building themes for the Brightpearl website system;
• Adapting existing designs to themes for the Brightpearl website system, supplied by clients or templates from alternative systems;

S-cool

Web Developer

S-cool is a market-leader in providing numerous educational products and services; the most notable of them is the S-cool Revision website which is the UK's leading commercial revision website.

I worked on myriad and varied projects for S-cool websites. This includes the corporate site (www.s-cool.com), revision site and the "S-zone" (www.s-cool.co.uk/s-zone/).

The revision site is largely just HTML, The "S-zone", however, is built using a small custom CMS using CakePHP. The corporate site is built using CMS Made Simple, an open source PHP CMS. All websites have parts developed in javascript/jQuery.

As well as development work, I also assisted with the systems administration work. This includes server management (IIS, active directory, exchange), helpdesk and .NET project releases.

My work and responsibilities included:

• Taking sole responsibility for S-cool's revision, corporate and "S-zone" websites; this involves development, design and maintenance using HTML, PHP and jQuery;
• Assisting with the creation of the content management system for the "S-zone" using CakePHP;
• Creating front-end for the "S-zone" using PHP;
• Updating content using newer technologies; an example is replacing flash content with jQuery replicas for wider compatibility;
• Creating AJAX driven pages for the revision site such as competition pages and components for the CMS;
• Creating microsites for the revision site, such as the NSA for Nuclear microsite (www.s-cool.co.uk/microsites/nsa-nuclear/);
• Managing and configuring Linux servers hosting various sites;
• Modifying and controlling host files, user management and FTP access (for all the aforementioned sites);
• Maintence including bug-fixing and backing up MySQL databases;
• Assisting with SQL server work for .NET development;