I have long been making the case that freelance software and website work straddles a multi-disciplinary intersection of converging skills. A one-man band plays all instruments — and will occasionally reach out to a soloist who can play a particular part better.
An interweaving rhythm taps out the need for getting detail right — nerdy pedantry, take a bow, please — and my inner quality-controller signs the project off just before it’s plain to everyone that further polishing might smudge the design — or trash the project’s budget. Freelancers and project managers know that this is how words, pixels and code eventually come together. With luck, these convergences also break new ground, generate fresh ideas and pose further questions. This website has become a vehicle for expressing some of that.
Diverging interests
The site has broadened and gained bulk as this journey has runs its course and I am surprised by and grateful to those who have encountered my various posts and made contact. I welcome visitors to this site and hope you find some long reads here that chime with your interests.
The focus is on web design and technology but other topics receive treatment in a less convergent manner — books, art, buildings and our precarious natural world — using photographs where appropriate.
I’m an English designer and developer of websites for individuals and businesses in the UK, France and beyond. I’m on England’s south-coast, having moved back here from a profoundly enjoyable 18-year stint in rural south-west France. I specialise in using the Drupal and Backdrop content-management systems.
I liken a website to an iceberg: there’s much below the surface that doesn’t meet the eye. Getting both parts — the visible and the hidden — absolutely right is crucial for the success of any activity on the web.
That iceberg analogy applies first to pages and the way in which they are coded, scripted and crafted, but it also applies to whole sites, including this one. The menus dotted about this site should lead you into collections of posts arranged by type. A site map experimentally blurts everything out on a single page. A handful of choice posts appears below. If you get lost, I hope that it will be in thought not in orientation.
(Any factual errors or typos are mine; all photographs are copyrighted to me, unless otherwise stated.)
