What I've done...

In the past, I have designed, built, implemented and tested various online applications and websites. Much of my work is not public, but these are some of my recent works which are or were visible to the world.

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SAViQ SAViQ +

SAViQ

SAViQ is a new skin care product which uses bee venom as it's main ingredient and is gaining popularity here in New Zealand.

SAViQ approached Garth Nicholls (www.mhmm.co.nz) to build the front-end of the website, and Garth approached me to build the back-end of the website.

The website uses the Umbraco CMS as it's core and has a custom built booking system integrated into it. It also is geo-locked to New Zealand only; and as such, I had to build a module for Umbraco which locked the website to only New Zealand IP addresses.

The site was designed by Jen Cheyne (www.jencheyne.co.nz).

Check out the website at www.saviq.org.

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Auckland Zoo +

Auckland Zoo

During my time at Ogilvy, Auckland Zoo required to move it's existing website from an old CMS to Umbraco.  I was selected as the lead developer for this project, building many of the features that are on this website.

Features that I developed were the full CMS integration, a newsletter campaign manager, a members area and an online shop.  The site was fully designed by the team at Ogilvy and developed in-house.

Visit aucklandzoo.co.nz

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Mile High Mile High +

Mile High

Auckland based band, Mile High (whose bassist was none other than myself) required a website to display their music, videos, gigs and galleries. I fully designed and developed this website, which I tried to incorporate many non-standard web features including horizontal navigation and parallax.


The website also features a distributed content system, meaning all of it's content comes from other sources. The biography and gallery are stored and managed from Facebook, the videos from YouTube and the gig listings from MySpace. This involved API integration and scraping.


Visit milehighband.com

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BP Explorer +

BP Explorer

The BP explorer project was a website developed while I was at Ogilvy. The premise of the website was simple: allow users to drive a real-life RC car online. The implementation, however, was a bit more difficult.


The website interface was built in Flash, while the website server-side was written in .Net and the car-control service was written in Java. Together with 2 other developers, I built all the components necessary to allow users to drive real-life cars online. Each 'game' on the website was a 5 minute session in one of 5 cars. This meant that there was a queue with a maximum of 300 people waiting to be placed into a car. Once in a car, the user was able to control the car via their keyboard using the arrow keys.


The website was very successful, being featured on boingboing.net and having over 30,000 games played. Unfortunately, it was also very temporary and therefore the site does not exist any more. However, you are able to view the images from the 'game' above.

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A little about me...

I built my very first webpage when I was 12 years old. It was rubbish in today's standards, but back then, in 1996, it was the very thing that got me hooked on web-development. I found it fascinating and saw it, even as a 12 year old, as the future. From there, I scored my first freelance job when I was 15, which is when I decided to do this as a career.

I moved to New Zealand from South Africa when I was 17 years old, and got my first job at Network Service Providers when I was 18 as a designer and HTML developer. From there I quickly learned PHP and built various websites and web-applications for their diverse range of clients; inlcuding Century 21 NZ, for whom I developed an online listings management system for their properties.

In 2005 I moved to Practiv where I relied, initially, on my HTML and CSS skills; but very quickly moved into a Java development role. This is where I grew to understand and enjoy object-orientated programming, building systems for large insurance companies in the UK which included Friends Provident and Bupa. This was very interesting and extremely challenging, but I missed the ability to publicise my work. I love beautiful design, and large industrial systems just did not provide this for me.

This is when I moved into advertising and marketing. I joined Ogilvy NZ in 2008, where I quickly got to grasps of .Net and C# and built websites, large and small, for companies such as BP, Sanitarium, CocaCola and Auckland City Council. My Java experience helped me to understand the way applications should work; and my design experience helped me understand how things should look. It is in this industry where I found balance.

So after 4 glorious years in advertising and marketing, I decided to move into freelancing. I believe that freelancing provides me with the ability to use my skills in the best possible way, and provide them to a wider variety of clients. I am always looking for new and exciting projects to build or help with; and with my experience in design and development, I provide a pretty well-rounded solution to any work that you need done.

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Get in touch...

Want to discuss anything? Perhaps talk about an existing or new project? Even want to find out which techniques I used to implement some of my projects? Just send me a message using the form below and I'll be happy to have a chat about anything!

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