Phil Lowles

Web design

With over eight years' experience in a web production and development team at Macmillan Publishers and Lexis Nexis, I have a solid understanding of web technologies and design. I am available immediately and actively looking for work right now.

Please see my portfolio for examples of my web design work.

Please contact me if you would like to discuss a job opportunity or if you would like to hire me to design a website for you. My rates are reasonable, turnaround times are fast (depending on the scale of the project of course) and I will always give my best effort to design a modern looking site that is responsive on PC screen, tablet or phone.

Skills

Experience

Lexis Nexis

May 2016 - Jul 2018

XML/XSL Content Engineer

Rate: £270 per day

Lexis House,
30 Farringdon
Street,
London,
EC4A 4HH
  • Converting Word documents into web ready XML using XSLt
  • Lexis Nexis is a prestigious law firm and publisher with a history that can be traced back 200 years, they are part of Reed Elsevier Group
  • Worked on several prominent journals and publications including Halsbury's Laws of England and All England Law Reports
  • Languages: XML, XSLT
  • Software: Oxygen XML editor, GIT version control using Sourcetree
  • Agile based project management methodology
  • Created an Excel spreadsheet to track bugs, time taken to complete bugs broken down by Severity and monthly team perfomance rates

Freelance

Jun 2014 - Apr 2016

Freelance Web Designer

Worked on freelance projects including: African Victory (a local African cuisine restaurant), 3rd Basingstoke Boys' Brigade (www.3rdbasingstoke.org) and TitanCon (www.titancon.com).

Macmillan - Nature Publishing Group

Feb 2012 - Jun 2014

Web Production Developer

Salary: £31,452

Brunel Road,
Basingstoke,
Hampshire,
RG21 6XS
  • Maintaining and troubleshooting the XBuilder page building system that converts source XML into HTML using XSL Transformation
  • Developing processes for new functionalities
  • Languages: XML, XSLT, HTML, CSS. Also learned JAVA and JQuery
  • Software: Oxygen XML editor, Eclipse, GIT version control
  • JIRA bug tracking system to log work and assign tasks
  • Agile based project management methodology
  • Unit testing
  • Developed process for output of citation documents in various formats
  • Created and led a training programme in CSS for my team members

Macmillan - Nature Publishing Group

Jun 2008 - Feb 2012

Web Production Editor

Brunel Road,
Basingstoke,
Hampshire,
RG21 6XS
  • Responsible for online publication of scientific journals including British Journal of Cancer (BJC) and European Molecular Biology Journal (EMBOJ)
  • HTML and CSS error checking and correction
  • Image manipulation using Adobe Photoshop
  • Worked on website redesign project for EMBOJ and EMBOR
  • Worked on archive conversion and update projects for various journals

Qualifications

Online training

2012 - 2016

I keep up to date on the latest technology developments with online training from websites like W3 Schools and Code Academy - including completion of courses in: HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, JQuery, Ruby, SQL, PHP and Python. Have also learned responsive frameworks (Bootstrap, W3 CSS) and CSS pre-processors (Sass, Less). There is always more to learn in this profession!

PTR Training (Wokingham)

Completed

Fundamentals of Computer Programming using JAVA

Nov 2012

XML: XSL Transformations

Dec 2010

Computeach Training

Nov 2005 - Apr 2007

CIW Designer (Stage 4: Design Methodology)

Pass - 90%

CIW Associate (Stages 1-3: Foundations)

Pass - 95%

IC3 Computing Fundamentals

Pass

Portfolio

African Victory Cuisine
(work in progress) African Victory website
Website I am currently working on for a local African food restaurant in Basingstoke. This is an ongoing project that will also include print design work on menus and flyers. I worked closely with the client to create the restaurant logo which informs much of the site design and aesthetic.
www.titancon.com TitanCon
Website for TitanCon, a science-fiction and fantasy literature and media fan convention that takes place in Belfast, Northern Ireland. I have organised and run this convention for the past five years including all work on the website. Features Paypal e-commerce integration, custom built backend database tracking with personalised email generation functionality.
Nature Nature Journal website
I worked at Macmillan Publishing for six years in a web production and development team. Read more about the daily tasks I undertook for the Nature Journal website including xBuilder maintenance, journal redesign projects, and learning new skills and technologies.
www.3rdbasingstoke.org 3rd Basingtoke Boys' Brigade website
Website created for 3rd Basingstoke Boys' Brigade Company. Features news section on home page generated via RSS integration from news blog content, random placement of right hand interest boxes using PHP switch statements, and embedded Google calendar and map.
This portfolio website My portfolio website
Read about what went into the designing of this portfolio website including responsive design utilising W3 CSS framework.
www.sermountaingoat.co.uk Ser Mountain Goat's website
Ser Mountain Goat is my online nickname on westeros.org (the George RR Martin fan forum) and this website features the projects I have undertaken as a fan of Game of Thrones. This includes the creation of a speculative world map artwork (created in Fireworks) and a huge ongoing project (originally begun in Flash but will migrate to HTML5) to track the characters and events of A Song of Ice and Fire in a day by day animated timeline map.
www.enlightenmenthk.net EnlightenmentHK website
A memorial website created for a friend I knew on the westeros.org fan forum who tragically died at a young age. He was a strong character with many extremely memorable, intelligent and funny things to say and I created this website to collect all his great quotes and posts in one place as a resource for his many online friends.