ashley sheridan.co.uk

I'm currently working at Them London, and have been for more than a year now. As Them is an agency, the work is very varied, and can often run to tight deadlines, but I don't let this affect the quality of my work and I make sure I give each project by best effort.

The sheer diversity of the work does mean I often get to work with new and exciting technologies, from HTML5 & CSS3 to touchscreens. While most of the websites are built around a CodeIgniter framework, there have been occasions when that didn't fit the requirements, so some things are completely custom, such as a data importer I wrote for importing and managing the email marketing data for Energizer Europe and Wilkinson Sword UK.

Them is a member of the IPA network, which means that employees are encouraged to spend time (both at work and free time) in research on various aspects of the industry. This is just recognition of what I was already doing to broaden my skills, and has allowed me to spend a bit more time researching new technology that I can make use of, and also highlighting better and more efficient ways of doing what I'm already doing.

My work at Opta mainly involved using PHP to import XML feeds from various sources into databases, and using that reformed data to generate output in a custom web framework. The focus was heavy on performance, both of the PHP script and the database itself, so the code and MySQL queries were optimised as much as possible to allow the many hundreds of feeds to be processed as quickly and often as possible.

A large part of my job here was to document the custom framework used to import the XML feed data, which previously had none.

While the focus of the work was on the back-end development, there was some simple JQuery and CSS tasks involved with the presentation of data.

Home.corp already had a site, but it was built entirely in Flash, had no SEO and no CMS. Because of this, I was tasked with rebuilding it in such a way that it would have a comfortable CMS and would be picked up by search engines. To achieve this, I rebuilt the site from the ground up, gathering information needed for the custom data model, and building a bespoke CMS for the purpose.

The CMS deals with creating custom heading graphics using a font that had minor structural changes made to it, auto-playback of video clip playlists in such a way that the clip currently playing can always be linked to via grabbing the URL of the current page, something which could not be done on the previous site.

More recently I've added image gallery capabilities, improved the general look and usability of the gallery and video clip thumbnails and added a tagging system to the videos allowing related clips to be displayed in grouped results pages.

PUA Training was a company I freelanced for for just under a year. It stands out the most of all the work I've done, and for that was very enjoyable.

There were several sites which were part of the company, each dealing with various aspects of the company and self-help as a whole. Mainly I was managing existing sites and creating small micro-sites, or re-skinning existing sites.

ViceStyle is a bespoke multi-lingual lifestyle website built on the CodeIgniter framework, designed to facilitate easier sharing of content between different countries and languages by the content editors.

The administrator-end of the website was utilises Ajax for updating content, a decision that could be made without accessibility worries as we knew beforehand exactly who would be using the CMS. The front-end of the website though is accessible, and care has been taken to ensure that all users can access as much of the content as possible, with the obvious exceptions bearing in mind the type of website it is.

I have also created and implemented a smart image resizing function for this website, allowing, for example, landscape images to be converted into portrait using clever scaling and cropping to prevent any distortion of the image.

I worked at blue Post Productions in London as a web developer since November 2007. The projects I worked on there have generally been in the media field, as this is the industry that blue is in.

My work there involved building websites and other systems in PHP, as well as a lot of front-end development for websites that involved writing a lot of (X)HTML, CSS & Javascript code.

More examples of some of the sites/systems I worked with can be found on my portfolio

For a year and a half I worked at HSBSG Design Ltd. where I was involved on several quite different websites. Some functioned off of a custom-built basic CMS I developed.

My portfolio details some of the websites I worked on whilst there. For a full list please feel free to contact me