Ironbridge Web Hosting

Biography

I was born in Yorkshire and at four years old moved to Shropshire where I grew up. I now live in London. Presented here is a very brief summary of my working life to date.

In 1999 I went to University as a mature student to study Multimedia Communication. The course lasted for three years in which time I developed many skills and even won an award. I left Wolverhampton University with a 2.1 degree and embarked on my new career as a Multimedia specialist. I didn't take on a work placement year as I had already got eleven years of work experience behind me.

I took to the computer programming modules like a fish to water. I think that this was because I had developed games when I was a teenager using a Z80 based Toshiba MSX computer (similar to the old Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum). I used to develop these games using Microsoft Basic and machine code (via an assembler program). This was thought to be quite advanced around the mid 1980s, certainly, nobody else I knew was doing this in my home town.

I should have gone on to study computer languages at college but around this time there weren't many courses available and I ended up doing an electronics course instead. I studied electronics at college and went on to work for several large companies, including Tatung UK, as a calibration and maintenance engineer (trainee). Although I quite liked the job, my time here ended with redundancy after just one year.

After a little time out developing my music skills, I went on to work for a surface engineering company servicing the oil industry. The company was fairly small but successful and I obtained many skills, I was a team leader for seven years out of the nine years that I worked there. Becuase the company was very small and my skills very specialised (only two other companies in England like this one), I felt a bit trapped, especially as I have always been a "creative" type.

Whilst working for the company I played in a successful band as a singer/songwriter. This was a great outlet for the old creative juices, but as time went on I felt I needed a vocation that would also be a creative one. A friend of mine had recently completed a Multimedia course and he advised me to get on the course, not least because our band manager at the time was also head of the course, Professor Steve Molyneux. In fact, it was he who set up the first BA Multimedia course in the UK, way back in the early nineties.

After University I worked for a Telecoms company called Glow Telecom, based in London and Shropshire. Here, I developed all of the companies many websites. You could say this is where I cut my teeth as far as web development is concerned. Because the owners of Glow were a large offshore investment company, I also got to develop many interesting sites for their other projects. Please refer to the Website Design and Development section of this site. Glow went out of business in early 2005, by this time I had set off to London.

When I arrived in London I started contracting for the Financial Times. The contract lasted for over a year until July 2006. Since then I have been working on three other contracts, the latest being Music Bros and Fantom Era. Both contracts are due to end in March 2007.