Some websites I've built

Before reading the entire post if you just want to check out the sites I've worked on here are some quick links:

Who-Remembers-Me.com
National Union of Mineworkers
Aiming Higher Coaching and Mentoring services
Destiny Church Wakefield
Kemshell Design & Print
Retroburn Game Studios
XBox Art
This site ;-)

Having been a professional web developer for many years I have built a wide range of websites over the years. Many of these are no longer live on the net and some have evolved a great deal since their inception.

In September 2003 I got a job as a web designer with Kemshell Design in Wakefield. For the first year or two I was making small websites for clients, cutting up designs and converting them to flat HTML websites with a bit of flash but nothing fancy. The company's other developer, Mark, was working on a website for another client, Who-Remembers-Me.com (2004 archive.org).

We started working together on Who-Remembers-Me.com and in late 2005 we performed a major overhaul of the back-end and the front-end interface to bring the site a little more up to date: Who-Remembers-Me.com (2006 archive.org). While working on this redesign and getting more involved with the site I was still developing other websites and moving more from a pure design role to a development role.

Now working for WRM Media (the company that owns Who-Remembers-Me.com) my role has changed to more of a general developer. My day to day duties can include some web development, writing shell scripts, monitoring and configuring servers and generally having an overview of everything that's going on with our systems.

I've had a little look around trying to remember some of the sites I've built over the years and below I'm going to list a few:

National Union of Mineworkers
We were commissioned to create a website for the NUM in about 2005 and I worked closely with Ken Capstick on the design and functionality for the website. The website hasn't changed much since it launched, there are a few new sections and some bugs (caused by browser updates) have been fixed but overall the look and feel of the site is the same as it was when I first made it.

The site is now managed by Big Cheese Design and I don't have any direct involvement with the NUM these days.

Aiming Higher - Coaching and Mentoring Services
I built this website for my boss' sister Wendy Glassock. She provides coaching and mentoring services to people and wanted her web presence to stand out from the others offering similar services.

The original site (2005 archive.org) was put together in a week or two but went through months of tweaking to get it just how Wendy wanted. The site looked good but I was never quite happy with it.

The new and improved site (link above) was built to replace the older version and while much of the text remained we gave the site a much needed graphical over-haul. Wendy came in to the office for an afternoon and we pretty much built the whole site in that afternoon. I really like the look of the site and was impressed with how it looked considering how quickly we made it.

Destiny Church Wakefield
This website was built to replace an older version built by Kemshell Design. I quite like how this one turned out, the flash header and the javascript menu were pretty neat and the site as a whole was nice and compact, yet informative.

I've not had much involvement in the site since I built it (and if I was still involved I'd fix the z-ordering of that home page flash video!).

Kemshell Design & Print
A small and simple site we built to replace the older Kemshell Design website. I didn't create the graphics though, simply cut it up and turned it into a flat site, not much work involved but it was quite SEO friendly and easy on the eye. The site doesn't show much these days as the company was sold in 2006 to Lick Digital.

Retroburn Game Studios
The site I put together to show off the games I'm making has turned in to more than that. I have put together a team of talented individuals over the past year and a half and together we are making some very high quality games and we're all excited about the possibilities.

The site was built as a custom phpBB wrapper, sort of like a CMS addon for phpBB. The graphics went through a few redesigns and some sections aren't final but overall I'm happy with the site right now.

XBox Art
Not so much a site really, more of a resource for game designers and artists. I made this site which grabs the Box Art for Xbox games from the Xbox website and allows the user to view them side by side for comparisons. We have used the site to help us identify good and bad box art in an effort to improve our own box art for our games.

This site
I put together the graphics and back end for this site in about 2 weeks and built it with the sole purpose of getting some high ranking listings on google for specific key word searches related to the things I do.

I hope by posting some XNA tutorials and information about the development of my XNA engine for Shadow Racers that the site will get some decent rankings for relevant terms and will also potentially get increased visibility for the games I'm developing.



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