So if you are here, chances are you have clicked the link from a CV or an email that I sent to you. I am so grateful that you took this time to click the homepage link, never mind making it as far as the blog. Before I get in to the details. I want to say thank you.
So why did you do it? My guess is curiosity. You want to see what I can do. And the best way to figure that out is to explore something I built.
About Me
I have 7 years experience in search marketing including SEO and PPC and Analytics. I am also a skilled web developer and I am hoping to make the transition from marketing to software development. Most recently I worked for the Guinness Storehouse as their Content Manager. I also study psychotherapy part time (Finishing in May, 2020) I love music and gaming, I'm interested in psychology and technology and I am the definitive ENFP personality type. (Extraverted, ideas driven, a fluid communicator and adaptable)
Why I Built This Site
I had an older site needed some work
A few years ago I made a terrible, TERRIBLE Wordpress site that I was immensely proud of. It served me well when I needed it I am still proud of it. You can see it over on DavidLS.com (I hadn't the heart to destroy it) But I did not have the skills I that I have now so I decided it was a time to update it to showcase some of my more recently acquired skills. My big concerns were speed and mobile optimisation. Something that the old site didn't excel in.
For example, the site at davidls.com was really slow to load.
I mean really slow...
There were a host of other issues too.
- There was no blog I was too confused by PHP but was too stubborn to us a plugin based solution. That stubbornness paid off eventually, I have since learned to code.
- At the time I was just getting started with bootstrap and had basic CSS and JS skills.
- It was riddled with modal windows that loaded on every page. I thought they were cool at the time.
- It was not optimised for speed, images were oversized, the hosting was terrible.
- There was no SSL.
- I had developed bad coding habits (hacking the core in Wordpress and over engineering etc)
But that still doesn't answer the initial question. Why did I build this one? Let's explore that a bit more.
I wanted to understand the full web development stack and CMS systems.
I am a huge believer in practicing what you preach and I've always been interested in the more technical side of SEO and web development. Since building my first proper content managed website I have gone further in to the depths of many CMS systems and web technologies including Wordpress, Drupal 7 and 8 and HubSpot's HUBL language and COS. I've learned about Twig and Composer, Git and SSH. I aligned myself as much with the developers I was working with as much as the marketeers. This gave me an appreciation of developers and system administrators and the work they do every day. More importantly it gives me and insight in to how I can help them as an SEO expert.
Quite often SEO's can be seen as an extension of Marketing. I believe that if you are going to make recommendations on a person's website you should have an understanding of what they've gone through to build it. SEO's need to know the ins and outs of the platforms they offer recommendations on at an abstract level. That's why I was able to achieve a mobile page speed score above 90 on mobile using Page Speed Insights
I achieved this by:
- Removing unused scripts (more work to do here)
- GZIP compression in .htaccess
- Minification of CSS and JS.
- Adding deferred scripts and asynchronously loading JavaScript
- Adding some new age image formats (WEBP)
- Moved to a hosting company that supports HTTP2.
- Set up Cloudflare
- Set up an SSL
I wanted something I could break
This site is not broken. My last one and it's countless subdirectories are. Through my time and exposure to Wordpress and Drupal I've learned from from very talented people many useful skills including:
- HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and Bootstrap
- PHP, HUBL
- MySQL basics
- Drupal and Wordpress
- Regular Expressions
- HomeBrew and NPM
- Git
- A basic grasp of REST APIs
- Basic bash scripting and terminal commands.
- Hosting, DNS and server configuration (mostly apache .htaccess statements and bits of nGinX and IIS with some outside help)
- Implemented countless tracking snippets, analytics updates and edits and more.
Right now I am doing UDEMY course on Python and the Harvard CS50 Introduction to computer science course so that I can demonstrate a level of competency of programming and scripting. In summary, I don't like to get rusty and I am an hands on type of learner.
I needed some content that wasn't Lorem Ipsum
It is all well and good building a site but my years in SEO have thought me that a brilliantly executed site with no content loses to a poorly executed site with amazing content 99% of the time.
Because I enjoy it
Most importantly of all I get a genuine kick out of seeing a red page speed score become green. When you hit the refresh key on a broken page and it loads, exactly as it should you get a hit of dopamine. I enjoy writing simple regular expressions to manage redirects or complex find and replace options. I enjoy the constant challenges and the feeling of solving them that only a technology job can give you. I enjoy the complexities of content both subjective and technical.
I am currently available for work in a technical SEO / Web Development role. If you or your company need help you can contact me.
Thanks for reading.
