In my role as Senior Programmer at Five by Five I’ve had the opportunity to work on many large, complex and intersting sites for famous, exciting, global brands.
I’m lucky to work with a talented team of designers (that make my work look good), a great front end development team (who rock at CSS & JS) and some of the most organised, professional and tech-savvy project managers and client services people around.
I have been the most senior (some would say Lead) programmer on all the web development projects listed below, and have been responsible for all the server side programming work. I have sometimes fulfilled this role individually and sometimes managed other programmers from my team and sometimes feelance contractors.
These are the sites I’ve been involved in with a bit of information about them and what I did, in no particular order:
- Island Cruises – islandcruises.com
This site allows users to search, select, configure and book cruise holidays on line. The holidays include 1 and 2 week mediterranean, transatlantic and caribbean cruises, 1 week hotel stays and flights from UK airports. Users can configure pretty much everything online, from the cabin they want to stay, to whether they want meals on their flights. The site also allows all customers (not just those who booked through the site) to look up their holiday and pre-book and pay for shore excursions. There is an extremely flexible special offer system allowing construction of complex special offers for example “free child flights when going on a cruise and sharing a cabin with 2 adults when flying from these airports but not those, staying in these cabin types on those decks and only if they’re staying in a hotel afterwards but not before”! Phew. The whole system is incredibly complex and was extremely challenging to design and build, but the site has had massive success, increasing online sales by over 200% in the first year! - Bionic Commando – bioniccommando.com/en
Built for Japanese games company Capcom, its a community site promoting the new version of the old classic. Incorporating video, podcasts, iTunes music store tracks, blogging/comments and integrating vBulletin forum software with single-sign-on for the rest of site’s user accounts. Other features include content management, integration of gaming stats from Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony Playstation 3, 8 fully localised versions etc etc. My role was lead developer, although during the firs phase I didn’t do much programming as was working on 2 other projects at the time, but I did manage another programmer in my team and a contractor as well. - Independent Personal Finance (consumer) – provident.pl
Indepent Personal Finance offer loans to people that might get refused credit elsewhere. There are 7 consumer sites for IPF, same territories as the corporate sites (see below) except there is no UK consumer site. These sites allow users to search for loans based on how much they want to borrow, how long they want to borrow it over or how much they can afford to repay each week. The user selects a loan from the search results, sees a full breakdown of its charges and rates then can apply for the loan online. The site has an incredibly powerful and flexible content management system allowing embedding various search/results/application modules anywhere on any pages with content managed text, images, faqs, videos, flash movies etc etc. The system allows administrators to upload swf files and it determines the aspect ratio of the movie within it, allowing the swf to be embedded anywhere on any page and it will scale accordingly whilst maintaining the original aspect ratio and have the correct height and width in the markup, without any pogrammer intervention whatsover. - Indepent Personal Finance (corporate) – ipfin.co.uk
There are actually 8 different territory sites running under different domains but off the same codebase and database. Territories include UK, Czech Republic, Hungary, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Russia and Slovakia. All sites are fully localised with proper date / currency formatting using server language packs and locale settings. Genitive dates are also catered for when required by the circumstances and the territory through custom functionality as the language packs do not cater for this requirement. The text in the sites not on content managed pages is still in fact content managed by a custom CMS powered translations system. The text that requires translating is identified and added to the database, just by browsing the site, ending that painful period at the end of development of internationalised sites when you realise you didn’t source all the translations you needed in the first place. - Premier Marinas – premiermarinas.com
Consumer site for Premier Marinas who run eight of the UK’s most prestigious marinas and have a yacht brokerage business as well to promote their marina services and yachts for sale. Apart from the powerful and flexible content management system the site features user account system that integrates with single-sign-on with WordPress, quote engines for marina berths, online ticket sales for visitor berths with real-time payment processing and a CRM system for logging all enquiries made through the site for berths, boat sales, marina services, yacht insurance etc etc. - Boats and Chandlery – boatsandchandlery.com
A site for members of the boating community to advertise sell their boats and chandlery (boat equipment and related stuff) online. Built for Premier Marinas who run eight of the UK’s most prestigious marinas and have a yacht brokerage business as well (also built their main site, see below). The work involved integrating the user account system with that of the main Premier Marinas site, which in turn is integrated with WordPress, and implementing secure online payment processing via a SOAP API with the payment gateway. The site also has automated reminder emails, a means of browsing items by categories and custom keyword search facility. - Guitar Hero III (campaign) – releaseyourrockstar.com (no longer live)
The site was built for the global games publisher Activision to promote the Guitar Hero III game. It allowed users to sign up and upload video files up to 100Mb of them doing their best air guitar performances. The best each week were compiled into a weekly montage video and published on You Tube and then embedded into the site, and Lemmy judged the best who will get to feature in GHIV. There was also a simple blog with comment facility and signups were passed to Activision’s central database via a SOAP API.
