I have experience of working in a wide range of environments: in small to medium-sized teams and on my own as a consultant and supplier.

My technical background allows me to understand systems that perhaps have a more mathematical requirement than most. As you can see from my project and customer list I have worked with teams of structural and marine engineers, environmental specialists, material scientists, lighting and engine designers.

However, that hasn't stopped me dealing with the more commercial aspects of job costing, project management, invoicing, point of sale, and sales management.

I can manage the entire process of software development:

• Initial analysis of the requirements
• Production of a specification document
• System Design:
• Technical Specification Document
• Database design and normalisation
• User interface design
• Implementation and Unit Testing
• Delivery and Installation
• User Documentation & Help Files
• Acceptance Testing
• User Training & Screen-cam videos
• System Support and Maintenance

It should come as no surprise that over the years I have worked for significant number of companies, large, medium and small in my capacity as consultant, trouble-shooter and developer.

Many of these clients are household names in Britain and Europe. Click here for a full list of projects and customers.

I utilise, where appropriate, new software frameworks and technologies that enable me to produce modern, robust and efficient web applications.

I keep abreast of the latest ideas in software development techniques via a permanent subscription to the excellent training site: Pluralsight. Part of the joy of working for myself is being able to learn about exciting developments and technologies and to apply them to real-world projects.

Of course I don't apply a different new technology to every project - the learning-curve would be too steep, but I do ensure that I am aware of and can utilise where, appropriate, new ideas.

I feel sorry for some of my friends in IT who work for companies that use technology which is now outdated; they have no knowledge of amazing new developments in software engineering and the exciting new tools that are now freely available.

Clearly it isn't possible to adopt all new ideas but some such as HTML5, CSS3 and Bootstrap (to design websites that automatically adjust on desktop and mobile devices) are here to stay, at least for a while and until something better takes their place. Tools such as Angular JS, MVC, Visual Studio ASP.NET and Hapi enable me to produce modern, robust and efficient web applications.

Website: Example websites are: the one you are looking at, QuadBikes Surrey and BRL Shipping Consultants (under construction).

An important aspect of modern web design is the Flat paradigm. This isn't just about a clean modern interface that eschews the heavy, 3D, bevelled appearance of buttons and so forth but about providing subtle visual cues and hints as to functionality. Now in its second incarnation, Flat2 - when used as intended - is clean, uncluttered, functional, ergonomic and aesthetically attractive.

Intranet: During the late 1990s I developed an award-winning intranet for Philips Lighting. This was in the early days of web technology. Since then I have implemented a number of public-facing corporate websites and web applications.

Logo: Whilst I don't purport to have graphics design skills comparable with a professional, I have designed several company logos and most of my projects have a pet name and associated logo or graphic.

Web Analytics is a term used for the analysis of information gleaned by web servers when people visit your website.

Google Analytics is free (for up to 10 million hits per month) and it is easy to install. If your website does not have Analytics installed you are unable to assess the success of your website.

Analytics will show you, amongst other information:

• Number of visitors
• Time of visits
• Bounce rate (visitors who exit after viewing just the home page)
• How long people stay on each page (an indication of how engaging each page is)
• Geographical region of the visitor
• Operating system used (including those of mobile phones and tablets)
• Browser used
• Whether a visitor is examining your website for the first time or revisiting

Statistics are gathered daily and the data is, for the most part, graphically presented and very easy to understand. There is also a real-time option to show current activity on your site.

Analytics is an essential business tool that gives you detailed demographic, behavioural and technical analysis of the effectivness of your corporate web presence - if you don't have this you are missing valuable marketing information. SDSL can retro-fit Analytics to your website, if it is not already installed.

If I had to name a single skill it would be the production of data-driven websites; five of the last seven major systems that I have produced have fallen into this category.

Advantages:

• Zero Installation Web applications require careful design to behave like desktop programs but have the advantage of not requiring installation on local PCs - all you need is a modern browser and a login ID.
• Access The application can be accessed anywhere in the world where there is internect connectivity.
• Ubiquity The same application will run on any type of computer and operating system that has a modern browser such as Windows, Mac and Unix. They will also run on most tablets and mobile phones.
• Low Maintenance There is generally less application and system maintenance. Such maintenance as may be required is centralised on a single server rather than being devolved onto many remote PCs
• Upgrades Upgrading the application centrally automatically provides the upgrade for all users.
• Centralised Data Data being displayed and updated is from a database that can be hosted on the same server as the website (or one local to it). Ammendments to the data are immediately available to all users.

The types of data held in the database will vary from one project to the next. In recent projects that I have implemented the data has ranged from ship's details such as dimensions, capacities, owners, builders, engines, equipment and events (for BRL Shipping Consultants) to carbon footprint and costs for construction, running and final demolition of buildings (LifeCYCLE - Mott MacDonald).

SDSL owns a Dell PowerEdge webserver sited at a server farm in the Kent Science Park near Sittingbourne. This supports a number of client websites and has plenty of capacity for more. It also hosts several virtual servers that are used for systems testing and product development.

The server has very fast web connectivity (T1 pipes), 32GB RAM, 12 processor cores and PCI solid-state drives (much faster than standard SSDs).

My experience with Microsoft SQL Server is extensive and even predates Microsoft's entry into this field. I used to work with Sybase 6.0 and 6.5 before Microsoft brought the product and started marketing it as MS SQL.

Most of my work over the past 30 years has been with databases and Microsoft SQL Server has been my tool of choice.

Free For small to medium-sized data applications the free Express version of Microsoft SQL is more than adequate.

If you have one or more databases hosted on Microsoft SQL Server then I would be happy to evaluate them for possible issues that could well be centred on:

• Referential integrity
• Table and field design
• Indexing and query efficiency
• View and Stored Procedure structure and methods

Query Optimisation

It is possible to show how the database engine accesses data by viewing the Query Execution Plan. This shows areas where the database engine is having to work hardest to retrieve the requested data and highlights where performance enhancement is most likely to be achieved.

Engine Tuning

For example, having too few, too many or incorrect indexes will cause serious performance degredation. Correct indexing can improve performance by as much as 100-fold. Various techniques can be applied to maximise the performance of indexes by matching the index structure to the nature of the queries being executed.

XML is arguably the simplest and best way of expressing structured data in a way that can be understood by the widest range of computer data systems. As such it is the modern lingua-franca for data transfer.

I have experience of:

• Using Microsoft SQL to generate XML data directly from complex nested queries by using the FOR XML syntax and XML extensions.
• Creating XML schemas
• Reading and parsing (importing) XML
• Using XQuery and XPath to extract XML data and subsets
• Generating reports directly from XML

PDF document creation can be done directly by using the iText system developed by Bruno Lowagie

I have experience of using iText to:

• Generate PDF documents directly from database queries
• Generating PDF documents from structured XML data
• Formatting the output of PDF documents to look attractive using tables, shading, font selections, character embellishments and so on.