My services were engaged by the marketing team to design and produce a content-managed site with two clear business goals; to drive down the spiralling costs of updating content from their existing agency, and to provide more dynamic and interactive website facilities for their customers

Using a similar architecture to the previous contract (see below) I produced a site with a bespoke extensible content management system which fully empowered business owners to create, update and delete pages without needing to understand web technologies through a simple to use but highly dynamic AJAX.Net based interface.

This consumer-focussed site also features user membership and profiling, Live Chat, promotional offer capabilities whereby the marketing team can create special offers for users to request, user management, user data export and an integrated e-newsletter creation and delivery system.

This site was developed using ASP.NET 2.0 with C# linked to a SQL Server 2005 database and working largely offsite I had sole responsibility for all stages of this project from the initial requirements gathering to the deployment to the live environment.

Feedback has been extremely positive, with over 20000 user registrations since the site launched in March 2008.

The same technology was then re-used for a sister site, the Coeliac Disease Resource Centre a site aimed at improving the understanding of gluten-related issues amongst healthcare professionals.

I then undertook a number of additional projects including establishing a group-wide SharePoint based system including development of a number of custom workflows, assistance with requirements gathering for a new CRM database and the further addition of new features to the existing Glutafin website.

I was engaged by this Microsoft Gold Partner following their acquisition of QA Training in order to integrate the two companies’ systems and to migrate a number of key client-facing applications to their new environment.

The original short-term contract was extended primarily so that I could lead and manage a project to create a new e-commerce, content-managed website.

The heart of this XHTML/WCAG A+ compliant site (at time of launch) was a bespoke extensible content management system which fully empowered business owners to create, update and delete pages without needing to understand web technologies. I designed the (3 tier) architecture for the whole system which relied heavily on well-known design patterns including abstract factories and strategies in order to both facilitate unit testing and maximise future flexibility.

The shopping basket and course booking system was fully integrated with the company’s legacy databases and the Datacash e-commerce gateway and presented the customer with a simple, intuitive interface.

The site was developed using ASP.NET 2.0 with C# linked to a number of SQL Server (6.5-2005) databases and deployed to a high-availability load-balanced environment. Session management was persisted using SQL server.

As the head of a team of 5 developers we successfully delivered the completed system under pressure from ambitious deadlines. The final system met with widespread praise from both the business and customer base.

During my engagement I also worked on a large number of smaller internal systems based on ASP/Visual Basic, ASP.NET 1.1, Microsoft Office (COM) Automation and payments processing.