El Nino Media Ltd is a one-man Web Design Agency based in London. Since 2003 the main focus of activities has been the day-to-day management and strategic development of two sites for the UK Government's Department of Trade and Industry:
SBS.gov.uk is the corporate website of the Small Business Service (SBS), an executive agency of the DTI. The site was migrated onto its current platform in July 2005 and based upon the SBS's Business Link website, which provides advice for small business.
My primary responsibility for the day-to-day management of SBS.gov.uk is the editing of content for spelling, grammar, clarity and structuring into a format suitable for the web. Then the HTML mark-up of that content for document flow and accessibility.
The strategic management of SBS.gov.uk includes the aligning of content in regards to the national Business Link site in particular and related government websites in general, and the ongoing development management of site services such as RSS content syndication and email alert services.
The SBS's Extranet is a service provided to the small business support sector and is a private membership portal. My current focus of work is improving the usability of this bespoke application.
I have also acted as content and information architecture consultant for the SBS's Small Firm Loan Guarantee lenders portal.
Other previous, and continuing, website work done includes sites for small to medium-sized business in the UK and Spain. I have also held positions at an early UK search portal and an online fashion retailer.
I can design and develop websites from project initiation to delivery. I am qualified in Prince 2 Project Management and can deliver to ISO-9001 Quality Management standards if required.
I can and do collaborate with other developers and graphic designers when appropriate.
Previous examples of my work include:
Some early site I worked on such Time4.net and the Gym Music School are no longer online, but if you really want to see them you could try the Wayback Machine.
Some clients simply need documents converting from a source document, most usually a Word document, into the HTML standard used by their website. I can mark up documents to any HTML or XHTML standard. Though earlier standards of HTML are now rarely used, and I would recommend using XHML 1.0 Transitional as a minimum, I can mark up documents to any standard required.
The sites I have done purely document mark up for are:
Websites, and government websites in particular as leaders in best practice, have a responsibility to conform to the standards for accessibility. The accepted legal standard in the UK is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as formulated by the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
I can provide detailed accessibility reports with recommendations for changes required to achieve single, double or triple "AAA" compliance against the WAI standard.
Please note that WAI single "A" compliance guarantees compliance against the RNIB's "See It Right" standard.
The accessibility of a website is a significant contributing factor to the ranking of site in the major search engines. Please see also Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Services.
The accessibility of Portable Document Format (PDF) files is increasingly becoming a consideration when providing web content in this popular format. As the legal requirements for accessibility as laid out in the full implementation of the Disability Rights Act in 1999 come ever more into focus, accessibility considerations have extended beyond the HTML content provided on websites.
PDF is an open standard, like HTML, but the vast majority of PDFs are created in Abode Acrobat and read on the Abode Acrobat Reader. PDFs can be tagged in a similar fashion to HTML processed for document structure and flow to both and basic and an advanced standard in Abode Acrobat Professional.
I can mark-up pre-existing PDFs to, in most cases, either standard and create PDFs to both standards from source documents such as Microsoft Word documents and Rich Text Format (RTF) documents.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a set of techniques for boosting the performance of a website in the search rankings of the major websites: Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.
The aim of SEO is to boost the amount of traffic going to a website, and so in turn increase the amount if business that a website does.
SEO is often seem as a rather arcane activity and different techniques are sometimes described as being 'white hat' or 'black hat' depending upon their perceived legitimacy.
The techniques I employ are legitimate. Essentially I look at and make enhancements to a site's accessibility, usability, metadata and copy.
I also analyse a websites statistics - using advanced web analytic programs such as Omniture SiteCatalyst when available, or the server statistics provided by a site's ISP at other times. This enables me to identify oportunitties for improving a site's performance.
Here are some examples of sites I have done SEO work for:
I also look at links to and from the site as part of this process. See Search Engine Submission & Marketing.
I have more than five years experience submitting websites to search engines and have a good knowledge of what programmes work and what programmes do not. I can market your site through both 'organic' searching and through paid submission programmes such as Google Adwords and Overture.
Search engine submission and marketing work should always be accompanied by Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Services.
Writing copy for the web is very different to writing copy for the printed page.
This is because screens, unlike paper, are back-lit and users don't tend to like to read as much text as they would on paper and can be averse to reading very large chunks of text. This often means breaking text down into smaller paragraphs.
Readers also tend to like to scan web text, so on the web it can often be better to employ some of the tools of document mark-up such as headers and lists much more than in print.
Writing copy for the web is also part of Search Engine Optimisation. How "keywords" are positioned on the page and how they are marked-up can have a significant influence on a site's search engine ranking for targeted searches.
Apart from editing the Small Business Service website since 2003, I have previous experience as an arts journalist with Edinburgh's The List magazine and I also have a copy writing and art direction qualification in advertising from D&AD.
23 July 2006