The following is a choice selection of websites I’ve had the pleasure of working on over the years. Some big brands, some small businesses and some personal projects…

Sky.com (www.sky.com)

sky.com homepage carousel

Whilst I was working at digital agency miggle, one of our clients was Sky.com. We handled updating their homepage during out of office hours which involved working remotely from the miggle studio.

When Sky.com were updating their CMS (content management system) I spent some time at their London office helping out while they were running both new and old CMS during testing.

Main tasks included updating the homepage carousel (pictured) with relevant news stories. These were often football, F1 and other sports updates.

This involved finding a suitable image and writing a good teaser to get the user clicking through to deeper content within sky.com.

Yahoo (uk.yahoo.com)

Yahoo UK homepage

Also at miggle I worked in a very similar role for Yahoo UK. This involved finding stories, writing teasers and finding suitable links to get users visiting deeper pages in the site from the homepage carousel. I also had to adapt a version for the BT site. (Yahoo supplies BT customers their own version fo the homepage).

Yahoo Green

Yahoo Green

Yahoo Green was a eco blog which whilst at miggle I took care of editing. I had the freedom to find suitable content for full blog posts and formatted them ready for publishing. It was great fun with an interesting subject matter.

Unfortunately the UK Yahoo Green no longer exists, an American-centric version still lives on and has many relevant posts. I recommend it!

AOL (aol.co.uk)

Aol homepage

Another miggle client was AOL. I did a lot of work on a varied content based projects with them but my main job was to create image galleries for the travel section. I’d be sent the assets from freelance journalists and built and edited them on AOL’s CMS.

I also selected and updated the ‘Hot Searches’ box on the homepage (pictured). This wasn’t done as you might expect by a complicated algorithm calculating what’s hot and what’s not around the internet but by a human (me).

Cycles UK (cyclesuk.com)

Cycles UK website

Cycles UK are a bike retailer with 16 stores and the cycling concession in Harrods. I have been working as their Marketing and Senior Website Manager since 2009.

What attracted me to Cycles UK was the opportunity to ‘own’ the website and move it forward. It had a dated look when I took over and there was plenty to do. Having now undergone a complete and total make over we are working on acquisition to take it to the next level. Core to this is testing and an SEO strategy.

An interesting factor with this e-commerce site is that it’s role is to also support the 16 bricks and mortar stores so there are varied conversion types to track. Sales, contact forms, store locators being the main.

I’ve brought in many new concepts into the business including affiliate marketing, social media and Email marketing. All of which I’ll talk about more extensively on this site.

Add a room (addaroomuk.com)

Add a Room web design

Add a Room are a building firm in Essex who specialise in loft conversions.

This is one of my ‘side projects’… I do work for Add a Room as a consultant for all their web activity and also designed and built their website. I’m good friends with the Directors who let me use them as guinea pigs which is useful for both of us as I can try new marketing and SEO strategies on them!

I am currently looking at freshening up their website and playing with the structure a bit to help SEO.

Audiosocial (audiosocial.co.uk)

Audiosocial website

Audiosocial is another one of my ‘side projects’… I love live music and wanted to set up a listing / blog focused around gigs in my local area.

It’s another site I plan to experiment with. I didn’t design the site but adapted a WordPress theme and used plugins to suit. WordPress is an extremely powerful and effective tool for this kind of thing. Why re-invent the wheel when there’s something out there that does the job and is ready to go for little or no cost and no time!

Capital Hair and Beauty
(capitalhairandbeauty.co.uk)

Capital Hair and Beauty website

Capital Hair and Beauty are a wholesaler to the hair and beauty industry and have stores covering the whole of the UK.

I worked for Capital Hair and Beauty as a Website Supervisor. Most of my work involved keeping the website up to date with prices, product information etc. I was also responsible for the website team who processed the web orders.

Window adverts at Harrods

Cycles UK advert in Harrods window

My favourite piece of advertising we’ve done with Harrods has to be the window covering I designed in January. I think the advert was impacting and I received a lot of positive feedback from it. It was great to have it along side a Stella McCartney advert for her new Adidas clothing range too. The ad seemed to fit nicely and the Cycles UK brand was seen by thousands of londoners.

Tour de France Official guide

Creative for Tour de France official guide

Over the last couple of years we’ve created adverts for the internal plasma screens in Harrods, the Harrods magazine and some external publications such as this years official Tour de France guide which we used in conjunction with Cannondale to show off some high end road bikes. Most of the creative for these adverts I’ve undertaken myself. It’s very satisfying seeing your work associated with such a prestigious organisation as Harrods.

Harrods Magazine advert

Creative for Ebco advert for the Harrods magazine

The innovative electric bike company Ebco were brining some of their range into our Harrods concession so we decided to do a joint advert in the Harrods magazine. We had a short deadline as the magazine was going to print within a few days but I was pleased with the creative I designed. Sometimes its much more effective when you’re under pressure to hit a deadline! I like the simplicity of the ad and it fits nicely with the Harrods luxury and classy feel (which can be difficult to achieve with bicycles!)