Digital Development

Change the Story (2020)

Careful Digital is a partner on this major EU-funded project which brings together pupils in schools across Europe to create digital stories about climate change. One of the outputs of the project Careful Digital are responsible for is the development of a website to celebrate those stories. It will allow visitors to search through and view the stories created, and hopefully be inspired to create their own stories.

Technical: There is quite a complex technical challenge here, as the stories wil be in a variety of digital formats, with many of the stories using different tools and technologies, and we need to find a way to present those stories in as accessible way as possible. The site will be developed using the wonderful 11ty static site generator and we are looking at storing the stories in the equally wonderful Sanity CMS, which allows complex content to be stored and searched easily. The separation of blisteringly fast static website and complex and sophisticated content management system will offer the best possible experience for editors and visitors to the site.

Online Book about Moby Dick (2020)

I am in the progress of recreating and moving all my sites to a new platform (Netlifyhna), which provides exceptional levels of performance. I am writing an online book about Herman Melville's famous novel Moby Dick at https://moby.jamesdrever.co.uk. Part of this project is figuring out how best to create books online, and sharing that in an open source way so others can use the same techniques.

Technical: The challenge here is to allow the creation of content to be straightforward and separate as possible from the complexities of creating a coherent website design, so the "author" can just write, and the site will "magically" create it's own navigation. This site is also being developed using 11ty static site generator and being hosted by Netlify. The book is being written in Markdown, which allows non-tecnical users to create content which 11ty then converts to a high-performance static website. The site gets the highest possible rating from Google Page Speed. I've made the code and content freely available on GitHub at https://github.com/jdrever/moby-dick-book

The Urban Science website (2019)

I created a website for the Urban Science EU project. The landing page for the project is at https://urbanscience.eu and the UK website is at https://urbanscience.eu/uk/. We did a lot of thinking about language and content for this website - how do we make the project relevant and exciting to it's main audience, teachers?

Technical: This website was created using the Umbraco content management system, in which James is a Certified Expert.

The Real World Learning Network website (2016-7)

This website supported the Real World Learning EU project. It is online at https://www.rwlnetwork.org/

Technical: The website were created using the Umbraco content management system, in which James was a Certified Expert. One of the exciting challenges was the RWL model https://www.rwlnetwork.org/rwl-model.aspx which features a hand design which brings the model to life. It was great fun working with Shrewsbury-based designer Martin Wright on this - Martin did a great job with the front-end design.

The Field Studies Council websites (2002-2017)

Between 2002 and 2017, I developed the main and various resources websites for the Field Studies Council. The main FSC website was large, including thousands of pages, and was updated by staff across the charity's 20 locations. The site included bespoke ecommerce functionality allowing for the booking of courses and purchase of publications.

There were many other sites I was involved in during this period. Amongst them were:

• The Slapton Ley NNR website at https://slnnr.org.uk/
• The Seashore website at https://www.theseashore.org.uk/
• The Life in Freshwater website at https://www.lifeinfreshwater.org.uk/
• Eco Challenge, Eco Challenge Xtra, the Biodiversity Training Project, Invertebrate Challenge - all now sadly lost from the internet

Technical: These websites were created using the Umbraco content management system, in which James is a Certified Expert. The bespoke ecommerce functionality on the main FSC site was developed in C# using MVC. The functionality was designed to be highly modular, using dependency injection. This allowed for unit testing of individual elements of the system, and for modules to be swapped in and out for testing and the outsourcing of work.

The London Challenge New Views website (2006-7)

The London Challenge News View project allowed thousands of pupils at inner-city London schools to participate in residential experiences. I created the website for this project, which allowed schools to book with providers. The project ran across a number of major providers, including the Field Studies Council, PGL, YHA, who were able to make their residential experiences available to schools through the website. It was an amazing project to work on.

You can see an archived version of the site at https://web.archive.org/web/20070630101916/http://www.newviews.org.uk/

The ANC website (1998-9)

This was my first commercial website - started in 1998. It was for the parcel company ANC, a truly dreadful first job (I could tell you some stories), but I learnt a lot. The website won an award, I later found out.

Technical: The site was made with Microsoft Active Server pages. I made the - then controversial - decision to use stylesheets. The site was built using frames but there was a non-frames version (I'd forgotten that - oh my lord.)

You can see an archived version of the site at https://web.archive.org/web/20070630101916/http://www.newviews.org.uk/

The FSC data hub (2019-20)

We created a data hub, pulling both historical data from FSC's legacy system and from their new bookings management system, and set up a series of reports via PowerBI.

Technical: This involved restructing data from a MySQL database and integrating the data into a SQL Server dataset.