About Me

About Me pages are horribly difficult to write and usually boring as batshit to read. I'm not thinking this one will be any different.

I'm a freelance designer based in Australia. I've spent most of my life in the corporate world but figured that the start of a new depression was a great time to start my own business (um ... not), so off I went. I have two really basic goals: be happy, do good work and make enough money to live a comfortable life.

Wait. That's three goals. Ah well, so much for self editing.

I've worked in both print and web, but the web is what I'm passionate about. What else do I love? Typography. Beautiful, classic print design. Grids. Web standards. Photography. Games. Social networks. My family. My friends. My dog. My cat.

As a person I'm decided loyal, with a tendency to be a little too judgemental and overly opinionated. I wonder why we never got those moving sidewalks or personal jet packs I was promised when I was little.

This is where I hang my hat on the web. I designed it to reflect what's of interest of me at any given moment – songs and videos I find on the web, bits of fact here and there, and occasionally the longer piece about whatever's on my mind. It's also home to my portfolio so if you're in need of a designer, please check it out. And then drop me a line.

What I Do (in a nutshell or, failing that, a bulleted list)

Fresh, clean & simple web design, hand coded using best-practice web development techniques

  • valid XHTML
  • table-less CSS
  • jQuery, Mootools
  • focus on content & making information easy-to-find

Backend development using Expression Engine

  • versatile, user-friendly and powerful, suitable for commercial and personal sites
  • extremely customisable – everything from blogs to more complex sites: wikis, forums, etc.
  • makes it easy for clients to update their own content

About Expression Engine

This site, and most of the others I've designed and built, was created using Expression Engine. Expression Engine is a fabulous, flexible content management system. You can use it to make anything from a simple blog to a more complex mulit-sectioned site. It is not free, but it's not expensive either. I've looked at things like Wordpress and Drupal and keep coming back to EE because it's easy to make it do most anything you want it to do. And the entry forms for users are extrememly customisable and easy for them to follow.

To find out more about why you should use Expression Engine for your next site, I recommend reading these posts from people who expressed the reasons to choose EE far more eloquently than I have: