Gary Voss | Web Developer
Gary Voss
Front-end Web Developer
When I stumbled upon web development a few years ago, I couldn't have imagined how big of a passion it would become.
Who knew I could spend my days playing with digital lego and solving puzzles and call it a job.
Having a career that continuously challenges me has become a driving force in my life.
And now I'm looking for that next challenge.
Take a closer look
Skills
One of the most rewarding aspects of the web development industry is how it never seems to stop. With always something new to learn, I have pieced together a wealth of knowledge that has given me the confidence to tackle any web development challenge I come across.
But i'm always working on those missing pieces.
Work
Over the past few years I have had the opportunity to work closely with household brands such as Butlin's and Haven, helping to develop many of their online assets and being involved in some extremely rewarding projects.
Take a closer look at some of the work I have produced.
Home ownership site
Building the Haven home ownership site has been my biggest challenge to date. As the sole front-end developer on the project I was able to experience the development process from start to finish and gain an understanding of the importance of maintaining a modular structure when building such a large scale site. The functionality demands of the site allowed me the opportunity to test and develop my knowledge across a wide range of areas, from building interactive maps to complex form elements.
Site now replaced.
Extensive site documentation
In order to maintain a complete understanding of how all elements across the site worked and interacted together, I felt it was important to develop my own grid system, rather than depending on any particular framework. As the grid grew in complexity it became clear I would need to fully document every aspect, to ensure the implementation teams were able to interpret how everything fit together.
Conference & Events site
For this project I was tasked with building a site that could showcase all Butlin's Conference & Events had to offer, that would be used during trade events. They were keen to produce something that would replicate an app to be downloaded as an offline site and loaded onto tablet devices. Therefore it was important to consider all elements across the site, relative to any potential screen size.
Adaptive build
The adaptive nature of the build allowed the site to be used successful not only on small tablet devices but also much larger screens.
Dynamic ad banners & editing interface
Having built countless dynamic HTML banners over the years and experiencing how long winded the process of amending content and testing can be, I decided to build a user interface designed to simplify the process completely. Rather than trying to interpret a spreadsheet and having to go back and forth to DoubleClick preview, the client can now see a visual representation of each of their banners and edit them in real time, making the whole process not only quicker but more enjoyable.
Integration with Google sheets and DoubleClick
These changes can then be submitted and output directly from the interface into a Google sheet, removing the need to edit the sheet itself and allowing a connection from the interface to DoubleClick, where the changes can be published as usual.
Home ownership eBrochures
Following the success of the Home ownership site, I was asked to produce a series of eBrochures for each of Haven's many parks. We were keen to maintain the look and feel of the website as much as possible however I took the opportunity to improve on the code wherever I could.
Owner services site
Often at Bourne I would need to make additions to existing, often outdated code. For this project I was tasked with bringing the Owner services site up to date with a new fully responsive grid system.
Complex functionality
The functionality demands of this site were a definite challenge and came at a time when I was just getting to grips with Javascript. Having to write a series of complex functions that enabled the user to manage the letting of their holiday home, not only taught me a great deal in structuring efficient javascript but also how enjoyable logic based programming can be.
Responsive emails
As a junior developer, my first introductions to web development was building emails, and although a great place to start learning the basics, the limitation of email development can be quite frustration. It was the redesign of the Butlin's family emails in 2015 that gave me the opportunity to see just what could be achieved through progressive enhancement.
46% increase in click through rate
Introducing a clean design with increased functionality for the email clients that would allow it, we were able to produce an improved user experience, resulting in a marked increase in the general click through rate. This also proved to be a hit within the email development community itself as I was given the opportunity to briefly showcase the emails whilst at the 2015 Email Design Conference.
Comprehensive templates
This project also allowed me the opportunity to re-evaluate the email building process itself. To increase efficiency and consistency across all campaigns I built an extensive catalogue of elements, significantly reducing the time needed to build a single email.
