Web / Design
I've always played around using computers to create designs. Developing websites can be exciting since it combines so many different disciplines: visual design, user-interface design, programming, content creation and many others.
Take a look below at some interesting website projects from the past few years. I've recently started my day job as a web developer so hopefully I'll be able to add more and better sites to the portfolio!
portfolio
14 September 2008
The National Piping Centre - Tuition Diary
While working as an administrator for the National Piping Centre I developed an intranet system to help me and my colleagues to schedule lessons, manage student records and streamline many other tasks.
The original lesson booking system was a spreadsheet on a shared file server. One big problem with this was whoever opened the diary first locked out anyone else from saving changes. Before you could say "database" I started working on a PHP/MySQL solution to the problem...
As well as an AJAX interface to book lessons, I linked in a student database which I originally created in Microsoft Access. When you book a lesson in the system, the booking is linked to the relevant student record so you can quickly get to their contact details, exam results, course bookings etc.
There is still some work in progress but other interesting features are:
- semi-automated e-mail-merge system (manage mailing lists for course confirmations etc.)
- a holiday leave management system
- a template system for setting up availability and regular fixtures in the diary
- use of metaphone sound-alikes gets round the Mc vs Mac problem!
- audit trails for almost all changes to the diary makes changes to, say, exam results, accountable
Last updated: Sunday, 14 September 2008
9 December 2007
Roddy MacLeod Piobaireachd
This website was created for Roddy MacLeod MBE, internationally renowned teacher and performer on the Highland bagpipes.
The site uses a custom built content management system (as used on the current site) that allows flexibility and control over both structure and content. Assets such as images, audio and video can be managed in an intelligent way, allowing automatic resizing for images and automatic recognition of tags for other media files.
Link: roddymacleodpiobaireachd.com
Update: The site is now coming up in pole position on Google for "roddy macleod"! Though maybe the competition isn't so hot...
Last updated: Sunday, 14 September 2008
9 December 2007
Freelance Musicians
This site is a search engine for musicians in the UK and has been created by myself for anyone who is a musician or wants to find a musician. It started life as a page on a youth orchestra website. This was difficult for the user to find the information and difficult to manage.
After taking over maintenance of the list I
- designed a database to make the data easier to search and maintain
- created user accounts pages to allow musicians to sign in and update their own information added location searching to allow searches for musicians in a particular region of the UK
- added features to allow maintenance, mail-merged e-newsletters, approval of new user accounts, banner advertising and monthly advert reports
- automated much of the routine maintenance for the site (e-mail notifications, advert reports etc. are sent out without any effort on the part of the administrator)
Visual design is intended to be unintrusive and images are kept to a minimum to allow the site to scale to heavy traffic.
Development and marketing of this site is still ongoing, the biggest priorities are increasing stickyness, enlarging the number of users and improving the quality of information in the database.
Link: freelance-musicians.info
Last updated: Saturday, 19 July 2008
9 December 2007
Sound-recording
This site was created to provide a professional looking web presence for a sound recording company.
The site is run from a basic, but bespoke, content management system. The CMS allows many key elements of the site to be managed including a list of clients, links, a picture gallery (with automatic image resizing) and audio samples (with automatic set-up of streaming metafiles and recognition of audio meta-tags).
The site uses CSS to create a consistent style between all the pages and is designed with accessibility in mind. Accessibility also allows search engines to crawl and index the site with ease.
Link: sound-recording.co.uk
Last updated: Monday, 10 December 2007