Certifications and Education are important. They are only part of what leads to an outstanding web designer and developer. Matthew has several years of hands on experience building business and non-profit organizations.

Experience

Experience working with web technologies helps to refine and develop a web designer. This "hands on education" will help the web designer learn to develop a higher quality product in a shorter period of time.

During website development there are often problems or issues that crop up. Experience will help a web designer to find and fix the problem quickly (saving time and money!). Experience combined with education will also help the web professional to prevent problems from happening in the first place.

Example

When I first began developing and designing web sites, I developed web pages like most others. For example I put the computer code (javascript/html) into the web page. When a change needed to be made each page had to be individually changed. From this experience I learned to use PHP (a computer language that runs on the web server) to insert an "include" (html and other code) into each page automatically. To update the navigation system on this site for instance I just have to change one web page, upload it, and all the pages are automatically change. What might have taken an hour before, now can be accomplished in a few minutes!

Web Applications

Matthew has worked with and customized a wide variety of web applications including: Forums (SMS and phpBB), Photo-Galleries (Coppermine and others), PHP forms, CMS (Content Management Systems like Joomla), and many others.