Who is this guy anyway?
In short; I’m an Industrial Designer based in Cape Town, South Africa. I’ve been plying my trade in the web space for the last few years, and am constantly trying to find new and exciting ways of combining the technical with the creative.
A more long-winded explination…
While studying for an Industrial Design Diploma at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in 1995 I realized that using computers to combine both my design and technical skills was where I’d find a career that I would pursue with passion.
Almost immediately, I fell in love with drafting and Computer Aided Design. It was through my love of CAD that I discovered Flash as a design tool, which ultimately led to my career in web development. Flash was still in its infancy back then and I was one of the first developers in South Africa to pioneer online games using Action Script.
Of course, Flash by itself is almost useless without Server Side Scripting knowledge. Therefore, after working for an ASP development company, I became well versed in combining Flash Movies and games with MS SQL and IIS. Nowadays PHP is my development language of choice. I love the Open Source philosophy and try to give back to the development community as much as I can.
With over 150 projects designing and developing web applications under my belt, I have extensive experience in managing and planning end-to-end. From small brochure web sites to large integrated business solutions, I have either personally designed or developed in a number of different technologies such as Flash, ASP, PHP, Ruby, Java and Python, to name but a few.
Today, much like the industry itself, my focus has evolved with the explosion in both the number and complexity of web applications and the billions of web pages they have to deal with.
For the average web surfer, finding what he or she is looking for has become a monumental challenge – one that the Search industry does it’s best to make easier for web users. It’s making these connections between searchers and publishers where the real craft now lies. Through focusing on usability, W3C web standards and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) good practices, web publishers are again getting what they always wanted – genuine page views. After all, sites that win awards for design but are rarely used or seen by the public, are usually a waste of developers’ time and their clients’ money, especially in a business context.
The Web has come of age and the effective dissemination of its relevant content is how success is now judged.