A selection from my portfolio

Examples of a few of the sites that I have designed

Hot Costa is my baby - started as a hobby, and now creates a small but useful income.

There are tens of thousands of pages, nearly all created on the fly, by means of a completely self-built CMS (or Content Management System), written using PHP, MySQL, and CSS. This site has many interesting features, which include multi-currency, geographic information, multiple look-and-feel, events listings which are never out of date, reciprocal link system with site checker and reciprocal link checker, non-reciprocal link system where site has not linked back to us, so does not get a full link from us, local information pages showing local hotels, properties, links, events, etc. using CSS, Javascript, collection of XML data, URL rewriting, restricted areas, automatic Google XML sitemap, and much more. Many of the features use extensive database access, so to avoid too much delay, some of the information is gathered overnight, using Cron jobs.

To get down and dirty, and see the features in detail some of the techniques that I have used, please take a look at the techniques page

Fourwood was designed as a partner for Hot Costa. Fourwood concentrates on Real Estate, and has links to and from Hot Costa.

Thousands of properties are listed from about a dozen different estate agencies. The data is used to create personalised XML feeds that can be used on other sites. A number of sites also syndicate the properties on this site, by means of a very simple link provided to their webmaster. Through the use of CSS, pages served to visitors from these sites retain the same look and feel as the calling site, thus making the properties appear almost as an extension to the calling site. A demonstration of this feature can be seen and tried at http://www.fourwood.com/propfeed.php

Properties displayed on the front page change daily

Visitors to this site are tracked by our bespoke affiliate software, so that commission for sales made can be paid to the owner of the calling site.

Geenee is a multi-lingual holiday site with a difference. Over ten thousand members can exchange properties for holidays, and there is a complex system of emailing when an enquiry is made. Members visit the members section of the site to find details about who is enquiring, and what they are offering for exchange. A feedback system allows members to comment on the quality of their exchange, and say how the other party took care of their home.

Members can also rent out their properties, and non-members can find properties across the world,

Finca Rojo is a naturist holiday venue, with the site done in the best possible taste!

Simple pages, with a simple Flash header graphic, to give the impression of peace - as the owners say, it's a chill-out holiday

Relaxing pages to tempt you to go for a relaxing holiday

Home and Away Spanish Property is a Real Estate site, designed to hook into the properties in Fourwood.com, but with one or two differences

This agent does not want properties from other agents to appear if this agent already has property in those towns. So although the basic design of Fourwood stays the same, a change is made to the SQL command which returns the list of properties

Properties on the Costa is another Real Estate site, this one is owned by a marketing company, which also linked into the Fourwood site, mentioned above.

You can see how this site interlinks with Fourwood - note that the look and feel is maintained (by CSS), and the [Home] button takes the visitor back to Properties on the Costa

Sell What You Want is a free ads site, which expands according to the items for sale. Sellers can create their own shop, and the items listed for sale on the front page change to display the most recent items added. The whole site is flexible, doesn't list categories until there is something to show - I hate sites that say "click here", then don't have any content!

This site is no longer online

Aguamania is a bar restaurant, whose owners wanted a cheerful, clean site, with lots of pictures, to let people know what was on at the venue.

As the venue is in the countryside, an interactive Google Map has been added, so that people can find it easily.

Buy Direct from Owners is a website which allows house sellers to advertise their property, cutting out the cost of placing the property with an estate agent. It has a Flash header which rotates the images at the top of the screen (not visible in the screen shot). There is also a members section, where paying sellers can add and amend their property.

British Full Guide is a directory for the UK. Still requires information adding, but that is the easy part - the code is the same code as is used in Hot Costa, so there are so many features available. The code has been written to carefully avoid any hard coding, so that it can be transferred to another country very easily.

There are guides to about half a dozen other countries online at the moment, all awaiting data, and a new one takes a very short time to be added. They come loaded with hotels, Google Adwords, Amazon, and Commission Junction included, and are just awaiting a partner to add the data and split the profits.

Full Guide is a directory with various methods of adding links to sites, and includes chargeable advertising sections. Visitors can add sites, but the sites must be approved before they are displayed.

Prestige Insurance is a website for an Insurance Brokerage company. As well as being used as extended information for local and national newspaper adverts, this site can collect details so that an insurance quote can be given. Insurance quote details are taken over multiple pages, which vary depending on the type of insurance requested, so the owner is notified of visitors paths through this section, to clarify to him exactly what the visitors were asking for.

Spanish Holiday Bookings contains listings of hotels across Spain which can be booked online. There are also a number of private holiday venues where visitors can also book holidays.

Special interest holidays are also listed. The site is just starting a major data overhaul, so will soon be more useful than it is at the moment, but already contains thousands of hotels with online booking, from a number of different suppliers, with data taken
from XML feeds from hotel suppliers.

Prestige Property Finder is work in progress. We are awaiting some graphics from the client, and although I usually do the property database, for historical reasons, this client is staying with their previous property database suppliers, and this is causing long delays in finalising. The website is standard, in so far is there is much of of includes, to enable new pages to be added quickly. Final W3C validation will take place whenthe client gives final clearance.

Spanish Living is a guide to Spain, with some thousands of pages, and a hundred and fifty thousand visitors per month, giving the opportunity for the owners to display chargeable advertisements. I have been working my way through the pages, and making them more compliant - when I came to this site, it didn't work in Firefox. I have been changing the pages slowly, and when all pages are done, the owner wants to re-skin the site, so the CSS has been written to allow for this

Landcorp International are a company selling land investment opportunities worldwide. Their current main offering is investment land in Nova Scotia, Canada. The site is designed to reflect the companies stability and quality. For this company, I have also designed a Call Centre program, so that telesales operators can work on databases of prospects. The Call Centre program makes a great deal of use of Ajax, so that all the data required at any one time can be viewed with flickering the screen, and without distracting the telesales person from their phone call. This program runs over an intranet, so is not visible to the general public

Art Face Off is a one of the more unusual sites that I have worked on. We have all heard of "Battle of the Bands" competitions, but this one is a "Battle of the Artists", where visitors vote for works. The site makes huge use of Ajax, so that parts of pages can be refreshed without re-loading the entire page, and the site also has members only areas. Work for this site was done 100% over the internet.

Prosperdoc is an american system, allowing patients to speak with doctors, and allowing the doctors to prescribe medicines for collection at the patients regular pharmacy. Huge use of Ajax on the Doctors Back Office system. I needed to design a very complex database to create this system. This site was also created 100% over the internet, keeping touch with the site owner via Skype

Costa Coastal Villas is a Holiday Rental site, where the owner wants to be able to allow users to add their property for a small fee.

The pages contain a great deal of information about the properties, and has a searchable area, which needs more properties listing to do it justice. The whole site is done using CSS - I particularly like the picture styling. There is a login system, and a protected area for people to add and amend their properties, and upload pictures. The site is still under development

I have also been involved, to a greater or lesser degree, with all the following sites - and many more besides!

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