Hello. I am a web designer & front-end developer.
I live in the wonderful city of Leeds in the north of England.
I like to make things that look good and work well. I believe that a strong creative design backed by a solid, user-centred approach is a winning formula for making online experiences that work for both customers and businesses alike.
Currently lighting my fire...
Sound Fusions - Musicians Classifieds
This is a personal project aimed at bringing musicians together through profiles and musician classified ads
You Are Not So Smart
An excellent book full of experiments which try to explain why we think and act like we do.
Forrst
I've recently joined the Forrst community, a great resource for designers to get feedback on their work.
What do I do?
I enjoy most aspects of web development, but focus my efforts on the following:
Creative design
I enjoy the design process which comes from taking business objectives and creating something interesting and visually appealing from them. I have experience in designing mostly for small-medium businesses but my first job was working for a corporate, which also involved lots of email marketing.
HTML/CSS development
As much as I enjoy creative design, probably the most rewarding part is breathing life into a static visual. Front-end technologies have advanced a lot over the past couple of years and by using a combination of CSS3 and jQuery, it is quite straightforward to add lots of enhancement to the design and user experience.
Search engine optimisation
SEO is one of the fastest moving industries around. Though not a specialist, I am aware of the many signals Google uses to rank websites such as inbound links, on-page content, markup structure, social signals and so on. Good SEO begins at the planning stage, and should be considered througout.
User experience (UX)
I believe that UX considerations should be part of the design process from the start. Often, when design ideas change throughout the process as they invariably do, UX can suffer because decisions are made which impact other areas. This can be helped by not deviating from spec and testing ideas before implementing.
Contact me
The usual means:
I can be reached via email, tweeted @matt5409 or called on 07825 710 983.
Other places on the web:
I might also be found drinking responsibly at the next snzero.
