About
Born in London in 1987, I've always had a desire to be creative. So when I first got connected to the internet sometime around 2000 - it wasn't long before I started creating websites!
When I'm not geekin' out: I like cooking, growing fruit & veg, cars, gaming, paintballing, and running.
Web design and development
Creating experiences and businesses on the web. Websites attracting half a million daily visitors. E-commerce platforms which trade between seven and eight figures annually. Advertising platform that delivers millions of impressions a day. Each comes with its unique set of challenges.
Media appearances
1. Snog.com was covered by TechCrunch, and various local newspapers in the UK.
2. Pizza GoGo website was shown in an episode of the TV show "Dave Gorman: Modern Life Is Goodish".
3. The Pizza GoGo Gold Pizza was covered internationally by many major news outlets such as Time.com, Yahoo.com, Businessinsider.com, Metro.co.uk, Mirror.co.uk, etc.
Infrastructure to serve millions
Calculating the fine balance between resource and cost. Creating infrastructure networks with hardened security and capacity for millions of requests a day.
Getting the most out of hardware without huge costs: Application specific Apache performance tuning, or strategic use of NGINX, for forward facing machines.
I have designed and built several high capacity set ups over the years. Without using (essentially) out-of-the-box elastic Clouds like AWS it helps keep costs down - and in some cases even reduces costs when scaling up.
Interfaces for business
UI design and developement for web, mobile apps, and physical terminals utilising user centred design - a focused and concise version of human-centred design with deeper analysis of target audience.
My ePOS (pictured), with completely bespoke User Interface, is currently in use by the UK's largest privately owned pizza chain, responsible for a significant amount of daily trade across the country.
User experience (UX)
UX design and consultation for projects ranging from simple apps to complex socio-technical e-commerce projects.
I have experienced in wire-framing, designing and developing user interfaces from scratch to production.
User Research and Acceptance Testing
I have also carried out some small scale User Research rounds, and User Acceptance Testing. Producing the reports and presenting it to a board of directors directly.
Documentation and planning
Every good project starts with planning and documentation. That's where the ability to craft concise specifications and design documents comes into play. Being able to create a detailed design document and pass it to a developer, then see your vision become a reality by another person can also be rewarding in its own way.
My interest in design has also in the past lead me to do 2D AutoCad professionally, and 3D CAD in SketchUp. This area of my design skill set is now used for wire-framing human-centred interfaces.
I have also helped plan intricate geographic based project plans for local council housing projects involving thousands of council tenants.
Search engine optimisation (SEO)
Creating simple and clean Document Object Models for search engines to easily read and analyse as standard: I have a good understanding of on-site SEO practices, which is proven by the vastly improved organic reach achieved in the past.
Partnered with SEO experts who can help you grow your organic traffic through not only their expert advice and optimisation, but also legitimate white-hat techniques to increase visibility and exposure. Get the traffic your business deserves.
Email & SMS marketing
I help build and run a powerful yet simple marketing platform any business can use to send bulk Email and SMS marketing message. With advanced live analytics, you can see in-depth data about who is engaging with your campaigns.
I utilise these tools to run successful marketing campaigns for companies all over the globe, delivering impressive ROI and engagement results.
History
(If you're interested.)
Around 2002 I was making websites for myself and making silly animations and games with Macromedia Adobe Flash. By 2004, while still in School/Sixth-form College, I was creating websites for clients in the UK and Canada albeit rather simple ones.
I was using Flash until its death to create interactive gaming maps, animations, and interactive media. I also spent a few years drawing 2D building layouts in AutoCAD for the construction industry. This would later go on to make my transition to 3D modelling understandable and reasonably easy.
Google #1
Around March 2009 I started MLWGames. To this day MLWGames has helped hundreds of thousands of gamers complete games with intuitive interactive guides. I used this platform to test various methods of SEO and traffic generating sources. I got the guides to #1 in Google (or at least first page) for targeted search terms. e.g. "Bioshock Infinite collectibles", "Deathloop collectibles locations", "Assassin's Creed WW1 map", "gears of war 2 xp calculator", etc. The associated YouTube channel has millions of views.
This experience has resulted in most other projects that I am directly involved in rank very highly in SERPs. Being above Domino's for "Pizza Chingford"? Thanks, Assassin's Creed.
Half a million daily visitors
In 2010 I became a full time independent developer - developing websites, social tools, applications and their interfaces. The social tools I worked on peaked at half a million daily visitors. This taught me a lot about tuning servers and scaling infrastructure.
In December 2010 I joined Now Marketing Global to help build a feature rich digital marketing platform.
The dawn of responsive design led to a whole new and interesting way to design websites. Which I had mastered by 2013.
Just weeks after the launch of the Pizza GOGO responsive website, Pizza Hut UK released a responsive postcode entry landing page (but only the home page, not the rest of their site).
Top international brands
Over the years I was working on various North American projects with digital and SEO agencies. This included Canada's biggest supplements supply company. I also built UrgentCare.com, and other US based projects. In 2014 UrgentCare.com was acquired, and I stepped away.
In January 2015 the food industry EPOS I designed and built started rolling out to 100+ Pizza stores across the UK and has not yet been retired. This facilitates tens of millions of pounds in revenue.
Millions of daily impressions
Around March 2015 I joined Publicity Clerks - a self-serve advertising platform. Here I helped rebuild parts of the platform, bringing it up to date, fixing security exploits, and hardening overall application and server security. We got it up to serving millions of Ads a day using the cheap purpose-built hosting infrastructure I created. It rebranded in 2016 and was acquired in 2020 where I continued to provide an advisory role.
Then in August 2015 was also when I joined the founders of Brighton Getaways. Over the next 5 years, on a shoestring budget, and countless business direction changes later in the fast moving short term lets industry - it evolved into a PropTech property management system (PMS) which is now one of the largest in the South East of England.
Since 2016 I've been running Gamertag.net - an Xbox and Gaming related tool. It has been used millions of times to check 10+ million gamertags and generate 34+ million gamertags/usernames with its Gamertag Generator. It has become one of the #1 resources for its purpose.
Award winning
My Getaways (formally Brighton Getaways) won the Best Property Manager London & South East 2022 award at the prestigious STAA Property Manager Awards 2022.
Gamedev journey
I set myself a new challenge in 2017 to create a small indie game development company - Scratchmark Games. I am initially doing almost all 3D modelling and texturing myself. Solo developing and self publishing Space: Defender Xtreme on December 1st 2018 and Devon the Electric Racer on August 11th 2021.
In April 2022 I created Mathsnapics.com over a few days.
July 2023 saw the release of my first commercial game project - GoGo Kicks. An endless runner game on iOS and Android. The game features real world rewards that can be earned in-game.
Returning to school
I went back to my old school twice as a speaker to talk to the entire Year 7 (11-12 years old) and Year 10 (14-15 years old) groups about the discipline required and how challenging yourself is needed to get into technical roles - which in my case ended up working on projects for brands they would recognise such as Pop Idol, Papa Johns, and Pizza GOGO.
The process was rewarding and had great engagement during question and answer sessions, especially with the Year 10s.
Fun sustainable fact: While a student, as part of a Graphic Products Design course, I worked with help from McDonald's "Education Services" at their London office to design packaging. I went for a more sustainable recyclable card packaging that came flat-packed. At the time burgers still came in polystyrene boxes. They now come in... more sustainable recyclable card packaging.
Mark, web developer, didn't actually study web design at school, but "You learn that way of thinking in Maths and physics"
— Future First (@FutureFirstOrg) December 19, 2012
Experience
Over the years I have worked for several internationally recognised brands both directly and indirectly.
I've led user research, managed international projects, and maintained server hardware to handle up to 8,000 concurrent users. I have worked on websites that trade millions a year. I have built infrastructure and maintained the platform on it handling millions of impressions a day.
I have good experience, knowledge and an interest in user experience (UX) / user centered design (UCD) and consumer psychology.
Development
I'd consider myself a Full Stack developer, with a general understanding of every layer that is involved in the construction and transmission of a digital product.
Working on a range of small and large projects across the world has allowed me to produce a battle tested framework capable of handling upwards of 8,000 concurrent active users and process millions of pounds of orders a year per web server, without the need of expensive 'cloud' setups or load balancing more than one server.
For years I have coded in PHP and design MySQL databases from scratch, but can adapt easily to other frameworks and templating engines.