Freelancing (August '07 – Present), Web developer

After a period of illness during my time at The Library House, throughout which I was still employed, I left and returned to Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, and performed the occasional piece of freelancing, including building a weather forecasting system for an events company and a company website for a debt management firm (http://www.cleardebtadvice.co.uk). I was also continually working on my own company's website, http://www.websupportsolutions.co.uk.

The Library House (Permanent, August '05 – August '07), Web developer

Development and enhancement of the company website, which was the main source of the company's income, providing fully researched information on companies from start up through to IPO. Complete re-engineering of the website and the complicated database was undertaken as they were largely unstructured. The site was built solely with PHP and MySQL, though an external search engine (Endeca) was used because of time constraints. http://www.libraryhouse.net

Lovefilm.com (Permanent, December '03 – February '05), Senior web developer

Development and enhancement of a number of award winning sites for LOVEFiLM, an online DVD rental company. This consisted of maintenance and development of new functionality for both the front end (general usability, registration, search functionality, movie listings, partner integration, product pages, etc.) and backend (self service help centre, site administration, content and stock management, Customer Service interfaces, warehouse control etc).

Again, the site was built with PHP and MySQL, and being very high traffic, highly efficient coding and database schemas were essential to ensure good customer performance.

The site had many partners, including http://www.filmfourdvd.com, http://www.fivemovieclub.tv, http://www.sainsburysdvdrental.co.uk/, http://dvdrental.cd-wow.com/, http://www.welovefilms.com/ (Daily Mirror) amongst others.

All of these sites use the same set of scripts, albeit with very different designs. This was achieved by building a templating system which allowed separation of design and back end functionality, in order to reduce maintenance overheads.