Professional Work of Rowland O\\\'Connor

I have been self employed since May 2005. My expertise is in the following areas:-

Full life cycle solution delivery of web applications and custom sites.
Search Engine Optimization.
Internet Marketing.

Most of my revenue comes from building and running my own websites.

Formerly (prior to deciding to go self employed), I worked for several years in IT Consultancy in both the investment banking and retail industries.

Portfolio

Broadband-help.com. Started in 2000, this site is now a huge resource of broadband related information and receives several thousand visitors daily.

Broadband-Best-Deals.co.uk. This site is designed for simplicity! It compares the top 3 broadband providers in an easy to use, quick format. No more “post code checkers” or on-line forms. Simply, view, choose and go!

Celtic Diving. This site has been redesigned using standards based CSS and is heavily optimised for SEO. It ranks consistently at top rankings in search engines for the key phrase “Diving in Wales“.

Berkshire Divecrew. Offering SEO advice only, this site now has top rankings in search engines for the key phrase “Diving in Berkshire“.

Phyllis Court Club. A full re-design including a clean, light-weight and standards based CSS web design. Extensive SEO has also been added to the site.

Technologies & Platforms

I work with the following:-

Microsoft .NET
HTML & XHTML
CSS
PHP
Microsoft SQL Server (versions 6 through to 2005)
MySQL

Standards, Values & Beliefs

Here are my thoughts on the IT work that I do an services that I offer:-

Design for Ease Of Use. Using my applications and sites should be intuitive rather than requiring reading reams of boring explanatory documentation! I personally hate reading instructions and always lose the booklets anyway (e.g. programming VHS and DVD timers I find to be a pain). Isn’t it far better to just “use it” rather than have to “learn it” before being able to “use it”? As a great example, I find using my Sky+ box to be a joy compared to my DVD recorder simply because using Sky+ is intuitive as opposed to having to read the DVD recorders poorly written (Japanese translation?) instruction book.
Meet standards. It’s pointless wasting time re-inventing the wheel. My web work meets current W3C standards wherever possible. Following standards gives maximum compatibility across platforms and devices as well as ensuring future compatibility. Specifically, you will NOT see messy legacy HTML tables used for page layouts and designs in my applications or websites.
Design for Performance. Use best practices to speed things up. In web applications / sites, this means lean, efficient presentation ((X)HTML) code together with server compression and effective caching.
Scalability Best Practices. After time, a web site / application might might need to scale out across multiple servers in order to meet growing demand. My work has this in mind (e.g. Session Variables are NOT used anywhere in my solutions)
Use Best of Breed Components. Again, it’s pointless spending time re-inventing the wheel. I will use best of breed pre-written components rather than wasting time researching and developing these myself.