Stories
I write primarily for WalesOnline and yourCardiff. Doing everything from breaking news, feature pieces, technology, in-depth interviews, community news and sports. I’m a versatile writer. Here’s a selection of my best cuts:
Body pulled from River Taff | Breaking news
Police hunt more Cardiff fans over FA Cup violence | Football/Crime
Tributes paid to former Pentwyn councillor | Community/Obit
Council to lock leisure centre users into memberships | Council/Community
Council takes over control of parking in Cardiff | Council/Parking
You can view more of my work on the WalesOnline author page or on the yourCardiff author feed
Video
I’m video trained and comfortable putting together news video packages. Here’s a couple:
Aamir Siddiqi murder appeal
UFO sightings over South Wales Valleys
UK’s longest Supertube opens at Festival Park
You can view more of my video work on the multimedia section of WalesOnline
Websites
I do a lot of work with websites, here’s a few:
yourCardiff.walesonline.co.uk
yourCardiff – part of WalesOnline
Built in just three weeks thanks to the coding genuis that is Andrew Wilcox. It’s a simple theme that was customised to create a community website. The site is a sub-site of the main WalesOnline site and has a focus on community news. It aims to get under the skin of Cardiff, show what’s going on and gives the opportunity for guest contributors. Built on the Wordpress theme it allows lots of customisation and we’re making use of lots of plug-ins and widgets. There is full Facebook and Twitter integration.
www.uclansu.co.uk
University of Central Lancashire Students’ Union
In June 2008 we started on the road to developing the Union’s web presences. We moved to the Reddot content management system and with the Universities web services team we developed a whole new website. In August 2009 we relaunched the homepage to make it easier to navigate and pull in our social media presences (twitter, facebook, youtube and flickr) as we found we were using these regularly to interact with our members and post photos/videos etc.
www.53degrees.net
53 Degrees
After launching the new website for the University of Central Lancashire Students’ Union we started work on the new 53 Degrees website to launch in November 2008. The events team said they wanted a site that showcased the venue and what was going on, and in particular wanted to bring more events ‘above the scroll’ so that the customer could see what was happening straight away. We used the Reddot content management system again and created a neat, compact, website that showed what was happening at the venue and gave the events team the opportunity to add news items when events are confirmed – while not affecting already confirmed events that need promoting.
www.blogpreston.co.uk
Blog Preston
Originally launched on a free wordpress site in January 2009, decided to move to a domain and get a proper design done ready for a launch in July 2009. Design is by James Duffell who working off my sketches created a site that allows us to have a featured article, a special drop down box if we need it for special events and has a nice category cloud that shows what the main posts have been about. There is Twitter and Flickr integration, plus a video box that pulls in videos from local community station Lancashire One.
www.mencapliverpool.org.uk
Mencap Liverpool
The previous Mencap Liverpool website was nothing to shout about, the information was outdated and there wasn’t a news function. In February 2009 I started work on a new website and launching in July 2009 the new website is a big step forward. It is powered by Wordpress and allows the key information such as projects to be presented by static pages, while the active news content is split into news, events and blog categories. The website is now actively promoted across all communications and ‘putting it on the website’ is becoming common place across the organisation. It also allows for more imagery to be used with news posts and reinforces the Mencap brand by using the colour scheme provided by Royal Mencap.
www.amsu.net
Association of Managers in Students’ Unions (AMSU)
I got involved in AMSU after being put forward for their voluntary web development group in early 2009. After initial planning meetings we started to sketch a new design for the site, with a focus on pulling all the great stuff that AMSU does to the fore and simplifying the navigation to make AMSU’s resources easier to find. We were using the Membership Services Limited system and John Wordsworth did the majority of the coding, my role was mainly in pulling together the ideas at the meetings and drawing lots of boxes on sheets of paper and writing ‘feed’ on them. The new site was launched in June 2009 and saw traffic increase by 50 per cent.
Now offline
University of Central Lancashire Students’ Union Facebook Application
Working with Old Tin Roof, we developed an application for the Students’ Union elections. This was added to a students profile and told their friends they were taking part in the elections. The application screen itself pulled in feeds from the student newspaper, Union website, flickr photos and youtube videos. It also had details of all the candidates and their manifestos. The usage numbers exceeded our expectations and helped to make the 2009 elections a record-breaking one with the highest turnout in the Union’s history.
www.frequencyradio.co.uk
Frequency Radio
Working with John Crossley, Media Officer 2009/10, to meet his need for a new website for Frequency Radio – the student radio station at the University of Central Lancashire Students’ Union. We came up with rough sketches and I brought in Prettier Pixels to design and code the site. The concept behind the site is that it showcases the current show on air, has details on each show and DJ and has an interactive schedule on the frontpage of the site. There is a dynamic news box that allows the station to show off five upcoming events or news items. There’s also a nicely designed social media footer that pulls in feeds from 53 Degrees and the student newspaper, plus links to the radio station’s social media presences. The site was launched in September 2009.
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