About Mark Willis
I'm from North-East London, and I'd like to consider myself a 'web engineer'.
Born in mid 1987, I've always had a desire to be creative. So when I first got the internet sometime around 1999/2000 - there was only one way to go: make web sites!
So, I've been making web sites/applications/scripts since 2002. From concept, to design, to final system development. Designing and developing both the front and back-end.
Having worked on some relatively large member based websites, I've had the chance to gain invaluable experience when it comes to user interface design, efficient site systems and accessible content.
My personally owned and opperated websites attract between 0.5 and 1 million visitors a year.
I'm also working for an Electrical Engineering company, which involves administrating and running projects for large clients such as Kier, Mansell and several London Boroughs.
2010 - Eflect
MLW Creative joins with Eflect.
2009 - D2 Business
MLW Creative joins with D2 Business to act as sub contractor to their web department.
2009 - MLW Creative
I founded MLW Creative (replacing MLW Design) in early 2009 as my web design and development company.
2009 - MLW Games
I founded MLW Games in early 2009 - a network of interactive and informative video game guides. Since expansion in 2010, the guides attract tens of thousands of visitors a month and are often regarded as being the best guide for their particular game. There was over 96,000 total visitors to the network in Feb 2010!
2008 - InBite
In 2008 I became the co-founder of the web company Roxbox, which rebranded as Inbite in June 2009.
2004 - RateAFace
2004 also saw the start of my involvement with the RateAFace project, which I later co-founded the rebranding and relaunching of.
2004 - MLW Design
I begun creating websites for international clients in 2004, under the name MLW Design. My first projects included sites and work for Spotted Dog Media in Canada, US-UK gameserver company E-Gameservers and UK Hosting site IG-Hosting.
2002
2002 saw 'MLW Productions' (MLWP) offering small scale sites. Purly for learning and entertainment, it was 2 years before my skills were strong enough to attract attention from clients.
Notable Projects
I hand-code everything in Notepad++. This avoids the bulky messy code you see with WYSIWYG editors.
I am strict with standards-compliant coding, and so everything I produce is tested against W3C standards.
I am anti IE6, but most of my work will still be built and tested for compatibility.
Here is what's behind my work:
- Server-side: PHP, MySQL
- Client-side: JavaScript
- Markup: xHTML, XML, CSS 2/3,
- Interactive: Flash, Actionscript 2 and 3, DHTML/AJAX
- Libraries/Frameworks: JQuery (inc. Thickbox). Lightbox.
MLW Games
My interactive gaming guides network.
When I noticed the lack of effort put into many game guides by big gaming networks - I had an idea. Build dedicated interactive sites for video games. Build them to be as helpful as possible - and then network them.
Every site I release goes viral. Being linked and discussed on thousands of websites, forums and blogs all over the world.
The tens of thousands of natural visitors, without the need of any paid for marketing, provides support for my initial idea.
- Thousands of visitors a day (Since Jan 2010)
- Over 96,000 visitors in Feb 2010
- 5,000 registered accounts and growing.
GOW2EXP
First person to crack the GOW2 rankings.
GOW2EXP is a rankings table and interactive calculator for the Xbox360 game Gears of War 2 (GOW2).
Being the first person in the world to publish an accurate list of all game level requirements (via a mathmatical algorithm) it gained me thousands of visitors a day when it first launched in March 2009.
- Hundreds of visitors a day (as of Dec 09)
- 53,000+ visitors & 170,000 page views in the first 6 months
- It's own Facebook App (since Sep 09)
RateAFace
Social rating tool aimed at teenagers.
Rateaface was a social photo rating site. I have worked as the sole developer since 2004, creating nearly every aspect of the system and interactive interface.
RateAFace was shut down in 2008 as it was a 2004 site struggling in a 'web 2.0' 2008.
In early 2009 the RateAFace project was re-born, a completly fresh start. Unfinished and in beta mode - if it will be finished is yet undecided.
- ~20,000 users.
- 90,000 page views a day during peak of existance
- ~500,000 user interactions. Messages, etc.
