Manchester web designer Phil Thompson
Last night, I went to a talk by Code Computerlove’s MD, Tony Foggett - part of a series called the Focal Point lectures. It was a very useful talk where Tony told us all about how Code came about and its complete history.
Whilst working at my last agency, I received an excellent piece of advice from the then Lead Developer: “Web development tasks never take just 5 minutes”.
When I first starting freelancing over a year ago, I quickly became dragged down with how much time it would take me to generate quotes/invoices and send them on to clients. Rather, than put up with that situation or pay for a solution I wrote my own.
For each of my freelance projects, I note down all the hours worked (on paper). This includes, phone calls, emails, minor changes, CSS debugging etc. At the end of a project I look back and work out how long the project ‘actually’ took - as opposed to how long I thought it took. Here’s an example from a recent project.
Prior to gaining my first job as a junior web developer, I often wondered how much I could expect to earn. Whilst at university, during 2001-2005, I heard a lot about the average salary for a university graduate being around £18,000 a year (regardless of profession) - whether this was an accurate figure or not, it felt realistic and achievable to me.
On Wednesday (31st October 2007) I worked my last day at Ichameleon Ltd and on Monday morning I started a new job for Aspiration Media. Although I enjoyed working for, and with, everyone at Ichameleon, my move to Aspiration marks an important step in my career as a web developer.
For the last 7 months, I’ve been doing the occasional freelance web job as well as my full-time job and it’s been both enjoyable and stressful.
Read the rest of this entry »
To try and increase sales and awareness at the JJB Sports website, I set about optimising the site for search engines and customers. The major success story was getting the site to the number 1 spot in Google (UK) for the keyword “nike trainers“. Here’s how I did it:
<img />... is the online home of Manchester web designer / web developer Phil Thompson.
A mini-update of recent work.
See my portfolio for more work