Web Development in Bristol
I have been in Bristol for over 20 years. I came here for Uni (computer Science for my sins) and never left. I cut my teeth in a local web agency and then went freelance back in 2010. Going back further than that I spent most of my teens glued to computer messing around with Adobe Flash and building silly animations.
I worked out of Mild Bunch on Stokes Croft (the original Bristol hipster co-working space) for 8 years, and for the past 5 years or so have been in Temple 1852, right next to Temple Meads. I share an office with two other Bristol web developers which keeps us all on our toes skills-wise and really helps with the tea rounds.
What I Do
The type of web development I do tends to fall into two categories:
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- High quality bespoke WordPress builds
- Creative front-end development involving animation and interactivity
WordPress Development
I know WordPress inside and out and have built large community sites, membership sites, eCommerce and microsites using plugins such as MemberPress, WooCommerce and LearnDash. WordPress has a great API as well and I’ve used it as CMS to power data for maps and even a fantasy football league style snowboarding website.
In general I try to use as few plugins as possible. Advanced Custom Fields is the one plugin all WordPress devs use on every site, because it essentially is WordPress and allows complete customisation of the fields and templates within a site.
As well as being highly customisable WordPress stays out of my way and does not dictate to me how to write my markup, CSS or any other code. This means I can stick to best practices, and keep evolving with the times based on rock solid fundamentals.
Front-end Development
The other side of my work is quality front-end development. I love working with designers and pride myself on matching designs properly. I take a pragmatic and common sense approach to front-end. Clean code is important, but I will absolutely pixel nudge or use an odd number for padding in service of the design.
I am well versed in web animation, from CSS keyframes, to Lottie embeds, to GSAP. I think I’ve been using GSAP since it was known as TweenLite way back when in the 2000s. Showing my age a bit there.
I do data visualisation (D3, and even Raphael back in the day), mapping (Leaflet js, Google Maps and street view APIs), 3D (Three js) and games (Phaser js on the web, Godot at night). This is sometimes known as creative development.
Teaching Web Development
From 2014 – 2017 I taught web development at Knowle West Media Centre working on some pretty wacky and fun web projects. Cardboard living room art installations with animated data visualisations, choose your own adventure video stories – that sort of thing. Several of the people involved in those courses went on to become professional web developers (and friends) which is one of my career highlights.