Simon Tiplady

Building, maintaining, and supporting an exciting selection of Magento and WordPress sites for Prodo's extensive collection of clients. Including multi-store Magento stores as well as brochure style and ecommerce WordPress sites. Recently starting to integrate HubSpot into existing projects.

Working with PHP, MySQL, LESS, SASS, CSS, HTML templating as well as Git for version control.

Working mostly with a single client of this agency, I took a small step into the unknown, working with an unfamiliar CMS (Kohana), combined with Solr search indexing, and a recently integrated Stripe payment gateway.

Each work session includes a varied combination of backend and frontend changes to further the features offered to free and paid members of the website.
Recently working to integrate content from a large XML representation of a book published by Oxford University Press and authored by the client.

During my time at Chester Solutions Ltd I have worked on solo an team projects. My roles have involved, developing, testing and deploying code. Website have ranged from sales and lettings, property agents, auction houses, local independent business.

My portfolio of work includes working on a variety of platforms including Joomla!, WordPress and Magento. Each project varies on the skill set needed but my focus on most sites includes PHP, MySQL and Javascript.

I have also experience of jQuery, CSS, LESS, Twitter Bootstrap and a variety of 3rd party APIs.

I pride myself on writing clean,concise and well documented code using Git source code management to track code revisions.

In team projects I have worked as part of a multi-disciplinary team where I work on a variety of levels, developing and upgrading code, supervising less experienced developers, and working with project managers and graphic designers to ensure the demands of the project are realistic and achievable.

Key skills

• Object Orientated Programming
• Strong problem solving skills
• Highly adaptable and flexible
• Performance analysis leading to database and code improvements
• Incorporating new techniques and ideas
• Extension customisation and bespoke creation
• Rapid bug fixing and cross browser testing for browser compatibility

After writing property xml feed import scripts for Property Mart PLC, I was approached by Starberry to work with them writing export scripts for property data from mostly Reapit based clients to be sent to Rightmove and 7 other portals, most of which no longer exist.

Since then I've re-written the way they handle property websites. Originally for Joomla 1.5 I was responsible for writing a new property extension for their increasing portfolio of clients. We now use the second major version of the system to support over 40 property websites both in the UK and overseas, and I'm currently working with a small development team to build the 3rd revision.

These extensions for Joomla include a series of component, modules and plugins which allow us to use a single codebase for a wide range of requirements through the use of configuration options and plugin overrides to affect behaviour.

Included Features:

• Simple search (address, price, rooms)
• Latitude/Longitude based search (radius from a fixed point or pre-defined polygons)
• User created polygon search (similar to the draw a search option on Rightmove.co.uk)
• Contact forms including simple contact, book a viewing, send to friend, request a valuation
• ... and many more features

Originally employed on a short term contract to write feed export and import scripts, as well as feed converters so that we could import properties from estate agents to the PMO global property portal.

During my time there, we also started to take back control of the website development which had originally been outsourced.

This was the trading name I used while working as a freelance developer, initially during the time I lived in Spain, and later in 2009 when I moved back to the UK. This later developed into Chester Solutions Ltd when I formed a Limited company.

During this time I worked with a range of different clients, including personal trainers, swimming pool builders, estate agents, marquee and equipment hire, holiday rentals and many more.

The majority of these sites used Joomla 1.5 and above as the backend CMS, alternatively I also use WordPress when the clients requirements are better suited to that system. I have also custom written both small hardcoded sites and small dynamic sites based on a custom written CMS, but there is rarely a need for developers to custom build their own CMS at the moment.

In my first commercial role as a web developer since leaving university this was my first experience of a "real" job. I assisted the lead developer in maintaining a completely bespoke system which grew extensively in the 2 years I worked there. From a single dedicated server in the beginning to a complex system of firewalls, load balancers, web servers and database servers, this website grew to be a global source of European lottery tickets online.

Frequent and rapid testing and deployment of updated code was required to keep up to date with the various systems that were in place. The final project was a complete overhaul of the website theme, implementing supplied static HTML previews into the website.