About Me

How do you do? My name is Rob Tyler and I run the Circlewebs web development services from a studio in Hall Green in the West Midlands, United Kingdom. My aim (when designing and building websites) is to follow a logical methodology (building from the user requirements upwards). I also strive to keep the implementations as simple and lightweight (in terms of code and image use) as possible, using (W3C) web standards as a guide. In this way Circlewebs sites are built to grow, and to be easy to maintain.

I list below are some extracts from my Curriculum Vitae which show my qualifications, skills and my experience of current web tools, technologies and practices.

If you'd like to read more, then here is a simplified description of my overall web design policy and philosophy, explaining how I go about the fairly complex process of putting a high quality web site together in a user friendly and easily maintainable format.

Education:

The Open University

MSc. Information Systems.

September 2003 - Ongoing

Modules:-

M873 User interface design and evaluation.

M874 Software Development for Networked Applications using Java.

M879 Distributed Applications and E-commerce.

The University of Central England.

MSc. System Design (Software Design).

(1 Yr Ft./2 Yrs Pt.) Sept. 1995 - June 1998

The University of Central England.

B.Sc Honors (2.1) Industrial Information Technology.

(3 Yrs) Sept. 1991 - June 1994

Skills:

Overview:

Web Site Requirements Capture, Page/Site Planning and documentation. Page and Site design using true and intuitive semantic mark-up (including microformats where appropriate). Site mock-up design and development using hand rendering followed by Page rendering in Photoshop. Further graphical elements generated with 'Fireworks' and 'MS Visio'. Origination of artwork. Search Engine Optimisation definition/implementation for page optimisation, Site implementation using hand coding in 'Dreamweaver' and 'Flash'. PHP/MySQL back office support including database design, setup and administration. Set-up and redesign/reconfiguration of open source software utilities (such as 'Drupal', 'WordPress', 'B2Evolution', 'Moodle' and 'FastTemplate'). Plugin' deployment and debugging in these systems and other Open Source components (e.g. 'script.aculo.us', 'Slimbox' and DHTML controls). Web site configuration control and server upload. Site Testing, Optimisation and SEO monitoring.

Applications:

Dreamweaver, MS Visual Studio 2008 [a], Flash [i], Fireworks , Photoshop, Image Ready, Illustrator (intermediate level), Topstyle, Style Master, JBuilder, Freehand (intermediate level), Paint Shop Pro, Visio, Acrobat, Font Expert, XAMPP (Apache, MySQL), CMSynergy, Subversion.

Languages:

HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, CSS2, PHP, Perl (intermediate), MySQL, ASP.NET 3.5 (intermediate) with C#, SQL, JavaScript (intermediate), ActionScript (intermediate), XML (DTD), XSL, Java (intermediate), Visual 'C++' (intermediate level) , C# (intermediate), LINQ (beginner) 'C'.

Platforms:

Windows 2000/XP, DOS/Novell, UNIX shell, Linux, VAX/VMS, Citrix Desktop

Software Skills:

Systems/Software Engineer. Data Modeling and Structured Analysis, Object Oriented methodologies and CASE tools. Applying Systems/Software Quality assurance principles and practices (ISO 9000/CMM). Web Developer to W3C Standards and the WAI initiative.