{ Work }
Over the course of the past two and a half years Andrew has gained pratical and first hand knowledge of working with in the creative sector as a web developer. At his position at the Graphic Alliance he proved himself time and time again, which led to the rapid progression from a junior to senior developer.
Several large scale projects have been designed, developed and implemented with Andrew as one of the principle architects. These include a fully fledged bespoke CMS system with over 30 dependant clients, and a innovative E-Commerce system with a suite of powerful and informative vendor admin tools.
Andrews primary programming language is PHP 5, and is sufficient in object orientated development. He is adept in JavaScript, after using the Prototype framework for over two years, making full use of its powerful Ajax libraries.
The nature of Andrews work ensures he fully understands the need for sub version control in particular environments. Yet he can also appreciate there is a definate trade off depending on the project scope, budget and timeframe.
Ecommerce
The latest large scale project which I was involved in was the development of a bespoke ecommerce system for the Graphic Alliance. Like most projects tacklled there was a whole host of challenges which presented themselves, and under tight time constaints and deadlines a logical solution needed to be found quickly heres but a few:
- product variations - same product family different sizes/colours
- the management of those variations - ease of duplication
- product categorisation - only one instance of the product should be in the catalogue, but can be added to many abstract collections
- product navigation - via product type, catagorisation or by abstract collections
The data storage concept is that the product and catalogue data for all vendors is held away from their website in a centralised location. This data is accessible via a SOAP service, which feeds the data to both their Website and also the vendor tools which manages it all.
Please note, the design and initial frontend development for both these sites was not done by myself.
Sites using system
A few ajax and dhtml functions which I developed can been seen here. One is the slide down basket and the other the product variations system which swaps products depending on user selection. I.E. Size and colour.
The Games Room Company site holds a very similar underlying layout as Austique with regards to the catalogue navigation.
This shot demonstrates the dynamic attribute harvesting and the parent & child category relationships