Personal / Freelance websites of old

OK, for now, Im going to take the last ten years - thats quite a chunk, but it goes back further.

My last three years have been full-time - so this is the first opportunity to do a personal site. The emphasis is obviously different - Im not actively touting for freelance work now, so the pressure is off. I have taken small jobs on the side, to keep my hand in - and I hope to be listing them here on the site.

The last ten years have mainly been focused on freelance work, so the sites were a calling card to agencies. My work during this period was categorised by a lot of London work with interspersions of agencies in Bournemouth and Poole as I tried to get more local work rather than having to rely on London work.

2017 - the very last freelance site

This site houses a working version of my last freelance site. Note - this is five years old so some of it may not work as expected, I dont have time to keep it all in check. At the time I had done a lot of banner work and was really interested in showcasing that. It inlcuded some neat bits in it I think. There was an awful lot of JS controlling stuff, with scrollmagic also playing a big part. Im not so keen on the animals now if Im honest - but at the time I was really trying to capture the sense of animation that could be done. The animation was done using PixiJS and a special Flash adapter that let you create the web based animation - some of which I cant even remember how it worked. There was a page scroll indicator and various other things like the exmaples page was able to calculate how to display all the boxes correctly according to page size - like Bootstrap.

2016 - focused on animation and banner work

So this site I had spent years making banners for a London based agency. I was hoping to get a foot in the door with some local agencies making more rich media HTML stuff like banners. As it turned out there simply wasn’t enough of it to really get it off the ground, although I was offered a position in Southampton which would have meant relocation and I decided against it. The site was based on Wordpress - there is no working copy of the site so I cant be sure of just how it functioned.

2012 - focused on looking for front end dev and design work locally

So this site being a lot further back - almost ten years, I was looking for fairly straight forward web design and development work. It was a restructuring of the same site from 2009, just with a facelift. Looking back at it I see that after my first personal site I built based in Dorset, looking for work based in Dorset, it was a fairly stilted attempt at being commercial. Id cut down the social down to just Twitter. Its the second site in which I used my own font that I created based on my handwriting. Looking back - it was probably my least successful period, and the site was the most commercial looking so probably goes to show how its not a good idea to try and make things how you think people would like t see them.

2009 - focused on using Kohana and building something really nice.

Looking back at this site now, I can see my intentions. I was newly arrived from London then, and I didn’t care about trying to get work in, more about making good stuff and thats why this site is a lot better than some of the sites that followed. It was based in PHP / Kohana and used really neat things that weren’t really used then - geo location using a thing called Brightkite - you couldn’t do it then via Twitter, FB and so on. It was a really good site and I should have left it as it was.