We always need good talented, website designers, why not send us a message with your details if you want to come work with us. The text below is a good example of what you should send to a website design company if you want to stand out from the crowd, A working ‘bespoke’ bit of coding and a portfolio of work along with a good track record and a sense of humour:
Let me get right to the point. I am a very experienced web developer, both front end and back-end, and am looking to take on freelance work in the evenings and weekends. I am in full-time employment, maintaining the websites of a construction retailer, but am looking for an additional income stream. I would be really interested to hear from you should you have any overspill work or any projects you don’t have in-house skills for.
A little about me…
I have been developing websites for over 15 years and have excellent skills in PHP, HTML5, CSS3 and JS (jQuery and vanilla JS). I also have extensive knowledge of MySQL, Magento, WordPress, Code Igniter and GIT, I work with SASS and LESS, know my way around a LAMP stack and am comfortable on the command line.
You may have heard of my previous employer. They employed me in 2007 as a web developer to begin with, but I soon became the Web Director, overseeing all web development output by the company for the next 7 years. We only had a small team of 3 developers, me included, meaning I did most of the work myself, so I either built or had a major role in the development of all websites produced by my Website Creative team between 2007 and 2014. This hands on role included PHP, HTML5 / CSS development, including CSS3 animation work, and loads of custom JQuery development, which gives me the complete package for developing user friendly and extremely functional websites.
The process flow, when I worked at the previous website design team, would start by a graphic designer providing me with an Adobe Illustrator file. I would then be required to recreate this design to be pixel perfect, cross browser compliant and future proof. To be able to perform this task I learnt a great deal about Illustrator (and Photoshop) and have gone through this process hundreds of times in those 7 years. Some examples of sites I have created have been added at the end of this email.
An Example of my Abilities…
I developed a PHP based quoting tool for my current employer at the start of the year, which I think will give you a good understanding of my PHP/MySQL abilities. I created a test version of the system on my personal webspace and have created a login account so feel free to login and have a play about with the functionality, it’s a completely isolated test system so you can add and delete as much stuff as you like.
Here are the login details and some instructions to guide you around.
1. Start typing “Julian Jordan” into the name field and an automatic search will look up my customer record in the database.
2. Select my name and then click the search button.
3. Click the ‘quotes’ button to see the list of all quotes associated to my customer record.
4. Click the ‘details’ button for the quote displayed.
5. You will now see the details of the test quote I created for you. This interface offers most of the functionality in the system i.e. create manifolds, create rooms, add circuits and floor panels to rooms etc. To view details of a room simply click it’s row in the table.
6. Click the green ‘review’ button in the top right hand corner. This will take you through to the summary screen where final adjustments can be made before PDF production.
7. At the bottom of the screen is the parts list, which has been calculated based on the rooms/circuit choices from the quote config screen. The quantities and unit prices for these items can be updated manually by clicking the values in the table at the bottom and additional products can be added by selecting them from the dropdown box titled ‘add custom part’.
8. When your ready, click the green ‘finalise and print’ button at the bottom. A branded PDF file is now created detailing the full content of the quote. In our business this gets sent to the client.
9. Every 20 minutes, the quoting tool synchronises with our internal CRM system, transferring all quote details to our internal system. These quotes then go through to the follow up team and ultimately get pushed through to our packing and shipping team.
This system was designed and developed solely by me over a period of 3 months and is a core tool used by our sales division. It was built using an MVC architecture, designed using the factory model, and constructed within the Code Igniter MVC framework. I used the twitter Bootstrap for the front end as the system needed quick delivery.
I think this gives you a good understanding of my abilities regarding data manipulation and system architecture design. It demonstrates my abilities to develop/work with third party API functionality and, in general, develop usable and functional tools on the web. If you added a nice looking website front end to this, this could be the kind of functionality used in a travel agency booking system, or appointments system (just to spark your imagination a bit).
I am confident in creating systems which integrate into third party software securely and robustly. I have also had extensive experience of building in WordPress and various ecommerce platforms.
To summarise, I am confident I can handle pretty much anything you can throw at me ;o)
Website Development Examples…
Here are some example websites I have built during my time at the website design company, I developed both front and back ends of these sites. I didn’t design any of these, I just made them work ;o)
We have to provide all signage and design work to the Food Retail side of the business. This means the design of menus, food posters, light boxes and restaurant designs for a large proportion of the food outlets at the major Merlin group locations i.e. Alton Towers, Chessington World of Adventures, LegoLand etc.. is all undertaken and managed by us. This contract involved communications between all food outlet managers, the senior management and the web design team on a regular basis. Their staff had to communicate their requirements and our staff had to demonstrate their ideas and design proofs. To facilitate this communication I developed a bespoke proofing system whereby designers could upload designs they had worked on, and everyone could comment and discuss the designs online in an easy and secure manager. A user hierarchy system allowed for specific individuals to have sign off authorisation and a full invoicing and performance reporting system was developed allowing senior Merlin management to review annual spend. This system is still used daily, 6 years after I initially created it, and is something I am rather proud of.
A fully responsive showcase site. This one was heavy on the JS to provide the functionality the client was after.
A bespoke quoting system was designed and built to calculate insurance premiums for the mobile phone insurance product provided by the client. It interacted with the clients own insurance management software for rates etc and fully automated the purchase process, producing PDF policy documentation to the end user on completion.
Originally intended as a showroom site, the client bolted on a pricing portal to offer custom price structures to specific resellers. The portal offers product image download bundles, for resellers to add product images to their own sites, and a point-of-sale merchandise request system.
The webdesign company based their business on a piece of third party recruitment software – This software had a web plugin, but it wasn’t very good, so we were commissioned to build a custom API for them. The software was based on a Sybase database, so the API development required me to learn about installing Sybase drivers in a linux environment, as well as build a modular and robust API to synchronise the 2 systems. We we’re approached by a blue-chip company after the project to help develop a white label version of the system they could sell to new clients. This option was never taken up due to contractual obligations elsewhere.
In addition to the build of these 2 websites, a single, custom-built, backend was developed to administer both the clients rental and retail businesses.
A bespoke back-end was created for this client allowing them to manage their property portfolio and administer other areas of the site
This site was, again, heavy of the JS to provide the client with the impressive feel they wanted for their business.
The login area within this website interfaces with the clients internal CRM using their API.
This client had an existing ecommerce provider they didn’t want to change, so all development was done within this existing platform. The platform was extremely restrictive so a lot of creative thinking was needed to provide the client with the functionality they wanted while still working within the confines of the ecommerce platform.
We used to undertake some outsourced work for media agencies in London. They didn’t have a very experienced in-house development team and so would commission us for projects from time to time.
The merger of these 2 companies required various staging servers to be set up and the management of data backups etc in a Linux environment. I provided this service to them.
Being an international aviation parts distributor they needed their corporate website developed in 5 different countries. We translated the site into French, Brazilian and Spanish and set up hosting services in the respective countries geolocated SEO purposes.
And finally…
After writing the longest email of the year….I just want to finish by saying thanks for making it this far and I look forward to hearing from you, now or in the future, should you need an extra pair of hands to meet a deadline or want to take on a project which you don’t have all the skills for.
