Sharpshooter Digital

Drupal expert in Bristol, UK. Site building, module development and theming. Community sites are a speciality.

What I do

I'm somewhere between a generalist and a specialist — a generalising specialist, if you will :).

My skills cover: front–end development, back–end development, project management, user experience, information architecture; and lots more.

I love design and typography. I did graphics at GCSE, so I can draw a straight line.

Front-end skills in depth

  • Advanced XHTML and HTML. It's clean, semantic, accessible and standards compliant.
  • Advanced JavaScript. Like everybody else, I had my own JavaScript library back in '99 — I prefer to use jQuery now.
  • Advanced CSS. I'm with the progressive–enhancement and graceful–degradation schools, so use the full capabilities of CSS where possible.
  • Pretty good Flash. I used to do a lot of Flash development (scripting and animation) in the Flash 5 and 6 eras, but less so now. My interest in Flash has been rekindled thanks to Box2DFlash and Papervision3D. I hate Flash–only sites with a vengeance though.

Back-end skills in depth

  • Good PHP. I used to write my own content management systems until I discovered Drupal. I use the CakePHP framework rather than start from scratch on projects.
  • Good C# .NET. Mostly websites, but I have also worked on Windows and console applications.
  • Good SQL. I've been using SQL Server since version 7 and MySQL since version 3. I've also dabbled with Oracle and DB2.
  • Basic LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) configuration
  • I've also done a bit of ASP, XML, WAP, Vignette, Coldfusion, JSP and Perl development in the past.

Content management system skills in depth

  • Drupal. I was looking for open source PHP content management systems, and Drupal was the best fit for my requirements. I've been using it for over 2 years — since version 5.1. I am an Individual Member of the Drupal Association.
  • WordPress. I use this for sites where Drupal would be overkill. It's definitely my second favourite web CMS.
  • Bespoke CMS's. I've built bespoke CMS's in PHP, ASP.Net, Classic ASP, and even TCL (Vignette Storyserver 5).

Design and multimedia tool skills in depth

  • Photoshop and Fireworks. Fireworks is my favourite image editor, but I am equally at home with Photoshop.
  • Flash. I've done lots of animation and scripting work in Flash. I much prefer to use a proper IDE like FlashDevelop than the horrid Flash IDE.