Jaspaul.com

JSSBB Online – Junior web developer, Email-marketing co-ordinator

Duration: 1 May 2004 – 2 July 2006

Background

I was hired by Sebastien Rousseau to work as a junior web developer and e-marketing coordinator.

My role within the company was to administer and maintain the website and database while at the same time develop and improve the current solutions by developing new applications such as content management system, improving speed, automating tasks.

Other main responsibility was to co-ordinate the email process. I was in charge of the full process from the moment the content and data was ready. Using Macromedia Homesite, I hand code all the email templates to meet the World Wide Web Consortium standards and develop newsletters that are compatible with all devices such as pc browsers, palm tops/ mobile phones, browsers, people. Another new style used is to develop the newsletters in CSS liquid design so that they email will look the same regardless of the recipients screen resolution.

Skills gained

Sebastien Rousseau has been the most professional and intelligent IT colleague which I have had opportunity to work with and played a big factor on influencing my career. The whole work experience has been a massive step up in my career and has taught me to embrace and respect new skills:

 

• • Open source standards – Use open source products such as PHP, MySQL, Apache etc to create applications which are more efficient, secure and compatible.

• • Open source standards – Use open source products such as PHP, MySQL, Apache etc to create applications which are more efficient, secure and compatible.

• • Coldfusion – Although I have programmed and developed applications in many programming languages, Macromedia Coldfusion was a language I had never used before. I was able to adjust to the syntax of Coldfusion with one week and found it extremely easy. In fact one of the most easiest languages in the planet as the syntax is identical to that of HTML tags. Unfortunately, I found the output of Coldfusion to be a big disadvantage, producing messy Javascript, large gaps and spaces within the code and slow loading pages.

• • MySQL – The MySQL database is a database management system which I have used before, but was able to advance further on my current skills as I relied on this to push 100% of the site database driven, back-end data storage for content management system, E-marketing software, Intranet and local forum.

• • URL rewriting – I was able to use Apache’s htaccess file to rewrite the website entire URL’s manually so that:
    • • Security – the underlying server technology is hidden. Instead of seeing the ‘.cfm’ extension at the end of all the web pages the user will see ‘.html’. This hides the fact that the web pages were done in coldfusion, keeping hackers guessing on the server side technology.
    • • Cleaner – urls can be shortened and bad punctuation can be removed. This could have caused problems if someone else were to link. I used URL rewriting to remove the ‘&’ and ‘?’ symbols to make Urls more readable and to meet the XHTML strict guidelines.
    • Search engine optimisation ? more search engines were willing to register a URL which was shorter and cleaner.

• • Advanced CSS – Design the entire website so that 100% of the styles are stored in a external CSS file a nd also coding with multiple CSS files for different devices such as printers, screens.

Projects

• 100% database driven site. When I arrived, the company was using simple html file with a ‘cfm’ extension at the end. The objective of this project was to separate and organise everything. The coding is to go in the templates, while the entire data to go in the database. This will allow:
  • Greater control – over the website and to integrate a content management system afterwards
  • reduce repetition of data in the site
  • Reduce the number of pages – Rather than have many separate pages containing each page, there is now only one page (index.cfm) that initialises the correct page depending on the URL.
  • Increase portability – ability to move data to another server or extract for other applications such as RSS and XML.
• Content management system – A CMS was one of the first projects assigned and was createed to encourage all staff regardless of technical expertise to be able to update the internet and add new content. I developed the content management system in PHP due to the greater speed efficiency and external components available (ADOBDB, SMARTY templates).