Welcome to JamesWells.co.uk!

Examples of my Work

This page is a short guide to the kinds of Web Development work that I have done.

Various property websites

ISIS GB , Crosby Homes , Kennet Island

My recent contract Web Development work has focused on building and maintaining property sales websites that use bespoke Content Management Systems. I have also been involved with the development of a new CMS system that will power many of the company's future web projects.

This work has included areas such as quick bugfixing and improving existing systems , to several weeks of developing and implementing a brand new Content Management Systems.

These sites are Content Managed so that the client can add,edit,update, and delete web pages all through their browser. There is a template system which allows the client to edit the layout via the CMS, and this also makes creating new pages simple and easy.

All the sites make extensive use of XHTML 1.0 , CSS, PHP4 or PHP5, a mySQL database, and varying levels of Javascript.

Cloth UK Online Store

http://www.clothuk.com

A picture of the clothuk website

My work on this site was to build a complete E-Commerce solution, which uses HSBCnet's payment processing system.
I took this project from being a simple product gallery website and built the customer login/registration system, then the shopping basket, before learning how to interact with the HSBC payment system and completed the project so orders could be placed and dealt with by Cloth UK staff.

The site itself built in PHP and HTML with some CSS. It also uses templates for the pages rather than repeating the same layout data in every PHP file.
The customer details and logins etc are stored in a MySQL database. Login passwords are not stored for security, rather an encrypted version is stored and compared to an encrypted version of the login attempt.

Orders are sent to Cloth, along with payment details to HSBC, and the Cloth staff can then login to the HSBC website and deal with any financial issues, or keep track of payments, and so on.

The main technologies used in this site are PHP, mySQL, HTML, and CSS.

Embrace DVD Preorder site

https://secure.englandagency.com/embrace/

A picture of the embrage DVD preorder site

This is a small E-Commerce site to enable customers to preorder a DVD of the band Embrace before release. It has some basic information about the product, and a series of pages where you can enter deliver address and payment details.

This project is, (except the layout and design), is completely my work. I covered all areas involved in setting up the system including setting up a secure web server, liaising with internal finance team to setup an online merchant account to enable us to take payments and configuring the backend systems to store credit card information securely.

I also had to setup the secure system to send payment data to a company called Xpay, who handle the financial processing.

This project used PHP, HTML, CSS, a MySQL database, a Java application to send data to Xpay, and XML pages for that data.

Various Flash Games and SQL Backend Systems

http://www.gofurther.co.uk/

A picture of the gofurther.co.uk site

The example I have linked to is the Gofurther website, which was part of several small projects to gather customer data. These typically used a Flash game created by a web design team, and some PHP/ASP code to get the data into a MS SQL/MySQL database, from where the client can extract the information required.

My work on the Gofurther site is based on the "beat the streets" game, where I was responsible for setting up a system to record the data into a database, and developing an automated system to send the client regular excel files with Names and Addresses of people playing the game.

Another example is a "safe cracking" game for a Disneyland Paris competition on the GMTV website. This game recorded address and name details of all the players, and if they won closed the game and notified the client. The client then had a database of names and addresses to use for marketing purposes.

My work on the site was again setting up the backend systems, making sure the data was recorded properly, and that the client could access the data easily.

These projects involved a lot of liaising with web designers to make sure that the Flash games could interact with PHP/ASP code of mine, and along the way I picked up a basic knowledge of Actionscript, which is the language Flash uses.

Technologies used on these were typically PHP/ASP, a MS SQL 2000 database, and some Actionscript.

My Personal site

http://www.jameswells.co.uk

A picture of my site

This is my own website that I have built mainly for my photography. I've been trying to get the design side done for months, but as a developer I struggle with web design since it's not what I enjoy doing.

It has a (incomplete) database of my photography, and automatically generates thumbnails of the photographs when they are uploaded, as well as recording information about them into a MySQL database. The photographs can then be browsed online.

The idea is to make a better photo browsing location than the current Deviantart.com page that they are at.

The site itself is based on a PHP template system, but it makes heavy use of CSS for positioning and layout, since I wanted to learn CSS whilst developing my site.

This is an ongoing project which I dedicate a few hours a week to, and I hope to keep adding new content (and new photos!) to it every week or so.