Bio
I have been active in the web development community for over 5 years; a humble post-student with a nack for designing web sites. At a young age I found myself fascinated by computers and haven’t stopped using them since.
As a web developer I provide a wide range of internet-based services. Most of the design and development work I do in-house. It’s just me, my studio, software, the internet, time, patience, and attention to details stirred up to bring stylish design and logical development.
Skill-set
Web designers have many computer languages at their disposal to help create fantastic, dynamic and interactive web solutions. I have been using (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript for over 5 years and have deployed smaller PHP/MySQL based projects over the last 2 years. My markup and coding practice is clean, easy to read, edit and maintain, validates and created using a majority of Open Source software!
Virtually(Creative)’s Philosophy
With Google Trends metrics showing large amounts of users switching to mobile and tablets to suit their internet fix it’s no surprise users expect websites to look good on any screen. Responsive design (like this website) lets you get the most out of your website by having its layout optimized for the screen looking at it, automatically!
Try it out! You can resize your browser window and the layout will change with it.
Who says the best things in life aren’t free? Open Source development has allowed millions of people with no experience to create masterful website solutions. In the hands of an expert, it can produce high-level enterprise class websites / Apps / software without enterprise level costs.
The next major step for the Internet and how it interacts with users, content and data storage has arrived. Cloud computing, architecture and deployment is changing the landscape of how a website should run. Websites need to be more secure now than even just 4 years ago and still keep up with exploding social media connectivity and user access demands. Will you be Web 3.0 ready in the cloud?
Personal accounts aren’t required to get important benefits from social media. Just like businesses require many types of divisions to operate successfully, consider social media your online brand buddy connecting the world and/or the specific user right to you. There are plenty of options to consider all with different benefits, so taking the time to plan a good social media plan of attack can increase ROI at a faster rate.
Everyone wants to rank well in search engines. But being able to consistently achieve high ranking results, even during slow times, is what costs the most. But using tried and tested techniques along with committing to a timeline will show the difference between quality traffic that converts to sales or quantity traffic that just click-through without exorbitant budgets needed.
Why use a freelancer?
Honestly, freelancers need work! The freelance market is full of competition and I believe it to be more competitive than compared to larger web design companies realms of client searches. Every freelancer is out to prove their value and you as the client receive the benefits of this increased performance.
Freelancers charge less overall, and good ones know tricks of the trade, which allow them to better accommodate various ways of tackling a project to fit your budget, while still delivering quality product. This is a great advantage over companies who have large amounts of staff and equipment to maintain and thus inflate prices for small tasks.
Personally, freelancing has much more flexible hours and since I make my own schedule, It’s not difficult to manage time accordingly to accommodate for a client’s meetings and timelines. Also, freelancers don’t run on business hours. You can still get in touch with us after the daytime ends. Some of my best work has been made between midnight and 7am..
Is a freelancer right for you?
- If you have a delay in your project, sometimes a freelancer’s hourly-time keeps ticking. If they are charging you a fixed rate per-day rather than a project cost or block development hours, that cost keeps increasing irrespective of whether you are waiting on feedback on your project. This may not be suitable for a project where feedback is required or is a mutli-stage concept design process.
- Some freelancers may not always be contactable after a project. This is perfectly reasonable – once they have carried out the work for your organization, they need to move on to their next job and be dedicated to getting that piece of work completed. If you have chosen well, your freelancer should be able to give you follow up advice, however it’s reasonable for your contractor to (if they have done a good job) get the work signed off and move on. This is different than if the work completed doesn’t work or has errors.
- Work is difficult to quality assure – for example, do you have an internal resource who can determine if the work has been carried out to a high standard?
- Handover. This is a very important factor, one developer will not necessarily work in the same way as another developer – in fact most are quite likely to work completely differently, their are many ways to achieve the same result. If your freelancer’s coding makes no sense or is a nightmare in semantics, it may prove difficult to support the work carried out by another (even if it has been completed to a high standard).
- If your freelancer gets hit by a bus, it may present some logistical issues. Hopefully they backed everything currently finished somewhere!
If you are looking for a low cost, shorter term solution (usually concept to completion in 8 weeks), a contractor/freelancer could be a good solution.
My Services