I place a high value on user-friendliness over flashy design; if a user is unable to easily navigate your site or application and quickly get what they want, then they will get frustrated and leave. I am strict about following recognised web standards wherever possible, and always try to ensure my work is as compatible as possible with different browsers and platforms. Below are some examples of work I have been involved in:

At Vertebrate Graphics I was responsible for most aspects of site development. Please contact me if you would like some information about the sites I developed and worked on whilst at Vertebrate.

At School Trends I was mainly involved in advanced technical support of our custom-built CMS system for over 200 customers. This included product development and improvement where necessary.

Specific development projects I designed and completed from scratch include:

• A fully featured AJAX-driven email client for MS Exchange (PHP, uses WebDAV over HTTP)
• Extensible drag & drop desktop gadget system allowing fine-grained administrative control over user group desktops and preferences
• 'Banners By Page' module allowing customers to easily create highly customisable single-picture or image transition banners which can be page-specific or inherited across entire sections of a site.

I was involved in the development of a certain top secret project with Knowcom over the summer of 2006; however, since Knowcom signed a confidentiality agreement I cannot provide any detail about the nature of the project. I left to do my MSc and Knowcom stopped development of the project shortly after. The work we did on this project was written using ASP.Net (Visual Basic), SQL Server, XHTML, CSS and Javascript; I wrote a scrollable, sortable AJAX-enabled Gridview (including full Visual Studio tutorial) for the project, which was basically a massively enhanced version of my scrollable, sortable table for .NET.

This site is written in PHP, Smarty (PHP Templating system), XHTML, CSS and Javascript. I have some plans for assorted cool features that may be documented in the Downloads section at some point.

I was comissioned to build a new site for ALT Powertron, using the content from the old site and adding some new content. Sadly the new site is unfinished and likely to stay that way as the new content was not provided and I am yet to receive payment for the work that I did. The site was written entirely in XHTML, CSS and Javascript; the code for the scrollable, sortable data tables is also available from the Downloads page.

Whilst working for E-Net Distribution as a European Account Manager, one of my clients approached me with an idea that could have potentially increased business for both parties. His idea was to create a new price list page that was more user-friendly than the existing page and would serve two different types of optical media customer; larger orders from medium-sized and larger businesses would be dealt with directly by E-Net, small businesses and end-users that consume large volumes of media would order small amounts of E-Net media from Nordic Tape, who would keep a stock of the most popular items and order anything not in stock from E-Net, who would ship direct to the customer wherever possible. The page was up at E-Tape.net for a few months, although restrictive credit and delivery policies at E-Net hindered its success. It was written entirely in XHTML, CSS and Javascript; inline CSS and Javascript were used as the customer wanted a single file for testing purposes. Since I'm not at E-Net any more I obviously won't be maintaining this page.

© 2005-2010 Sam Maister, All Rights Reserved.