freelance digital website designer Leeds, Yorkshire
freelance digital website designer Leeds, Yorkshire
From a very young age I have always loved arts and crafts, and at school my art, technical drawing and graphic design lessons were by far my favourite. Once I had learnt that I could pursue a career in design I was instantly sold. At 19 I moved up to Hull to study Graphic Design at the Hull School of Art and Design - I was attracted to this place more than any others because of their amazing screen print rooms, huge photography studio and wood work room. I loved every second of my degree and was very sad to leave.
After dipping my toe in the water a few times with some print design roles, I secured a job at Indigo in the centre of Hull. My role there required me to design websites and pass them on to a developer to be built. As much as I enjoyed the design work, I felt disillusioned at having to hand my work over to someone else, and then disappointed when the final site did not have the detail and quality which I had intended. So I decided to go back to university, and learn more about the design and development of websites; then I would be able to own the whole process.
In 2005 I studied a Masters in Website Design and Development at the University of Hull, in Scarborough. Here I learnt invaluable knowledge about building websites to web standards, the importance of usability and accessibility. I learnt a range of languages such as html, css, javaScript and xml, along with other technologies such as stream media, Flash and SVG. In one year I gathered a great deal of information, which is fundamentally essential in any web based role.
This lead me on to my current role at Cubik in Leeds. Cubik produce content management systems, work mainly in the charity and third sector, and have an impressive client base of nearly 200. In my role as part of the design team I project manage the design and implementation from start to finish.
In addition to my day to day design role I am also the in-house specialist in e-bulletins. This requires me to oversee the integration of an e-bulletin system, study the inner workings of the system, and pass on this knowledge to my colleagues and directors. In addition to this, I produced a user guide document for the design team, showing them how to set up email templates on the system, along with a troubleshooting guide for the support team, so that they feel confident to deal with any client queries. I also produced a fully illustrated, step-by-step user guide for the clients, with the intention to alleviate the pressure on our support team, and allow the clients to use the system without the need for formal training. This has proved to be wholly successfully and has added an extra specialism to the company, with little impact upon resources.
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