Front End Kung Fu

I am proficient in HTML5 and CSS3, with a grounding in jQuery. I started life as a graphic designer and artworker. I have exposure to a wide variety of development environments, including Drupal, Ruby on Rails, WordPress, .NET and JSP.

HTML5

Anyone can write HTML, it was designed to be easy. But it takes experience, insight and foresight to write well structured, semantic HTML. Semantic HTML is important because it gives meaning: to users, search engines and CSS stylists. It is the foundation upon which accessible and responsive websites are built.

HTML5 is the latest incarnation of HTML and adds more structural tags, plus many other exciting new features.

CSS3

Cascading Style Sheets are where visual design mashes with markup. CSS3 gives you native drop shadows, rounded corners, media queries and other goodies.

As a precursor to all the shiny things, you need to know how to build efficient, scalable and modular CSS. This ensures your site is browser and future proof. What helps in this process is a CSS preprocessor, a programmers toolkit for CSS. I use Sass.

jQuery

I am not a programmer, I am a web designer. So thank goodness for jQuery, as it makes the JavaScript programming language accessible to a CSSophile like myself. I use it mostly for image galleries and interface effects.

Graphics

I started life as a graphic designer. I have pushed a panoply of pixels with Photoshop, inveigled various vectors with Illustrator and fomented fertile forays with Fireworks. Organisation, optimisation and pixel-perfect precision are my hallmarks.

CMS

When I’m not coding front ends for the great and the good, I’ll be found dabbling with my own creations. Depending upon the project, I will use WordPress (lovely interface, quick to setup), Drupal (powerful feature-set for a non-programmer) or the Ruby CMS Nesta (swift, simple, github friendly, uses HAML and Markdown).