Tag: Development

Water Quality Information System – UNICEF

Posted on | by Ben Whalley

Riscon Solutions Limited is a global consulting company specialising in information and knowledge management. Roger from Riscon approached me to work on various projects because of my experience with MySQL and WordPress. As a consultant working with UNICEF and the communities in the south Pacific ocean, Roger wanted to build an information system that allowed users from the Governments of Vanuatu and Fiji to record and manage data regarding water quality and events such as tropical cyclones.

The system utilises the WPDatatables WordPress plugin, giving users access to tables, charts and data management. We also built a range of data input forms using the Gravity Forms WordPress plugin. These were welcomed by engineers and workers on the ground as they simplified the recording of vital water quality information throughout the region.

Another requirement was that the system needed to interface with some of the existing 3rd party data collection products such as Jotform and Integromat. This was achieved by integrating the respective products API with the MySQL database to store the data.

Tracy Hill website screenshot

Tracy Hill

Posted on | by Ben Whalley

Tracy Hill is an award-winning artist, Senior Printmaking Technician at UCLan and Research Associate for Artlab Contemporary Print Studios. Tracy has shown works across the UK and internationally in Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, India, Krakow, Serbia, Shanghai and the USA.

Having worked with other artists at UCLan, Tracy and I collaborated to design and develop a portfolio and blog. The brief was to provide Tracy with a space to exhibit her extensive art portfolio and somewhere people could find Tracy’s research. I built a responsive, clean gallery-style website and blog using the Avada theme on top of WordPress.

Tracy needed to easily create new blog posts that retained the style of the overall site design. To achieve this I created a set of custom blog templates that could be quickly edited and published by Tracy when necessary.

Caelus Drones

Posted on | by Ben Whalley

Richard of Caelus Drones, approached me following my work with North West Vintage VW, to design and develop an eCommerce website for his start-up drone sales and services business.

I created the branding and logo designs and using the created guidelines designed and developed a WordPress driven site that delivers an easy to use experience for the user.

WooCommerce was a solid choice for the eCommerce side because of its integration with both PayPal and Stripe payment gateways, as well as accepting payment via BACS and cheque. Richard wanted the ability to integrate 3rd party finance calculators, which was easily achieved via the custom plugins supported by WordPress.

Richard and the team at Caelus were delighted with the end result.

Avada WordPress Theme

Posted on | by Ben Whalley

Purple Custard is a Lancashire based design, branding and marketing company that creates beautiful websites. Craig at Purple Custard reached out to me for help developing a new WordPress theme that would be included in the upcoming Avada WordPress theme update. Avada is a world-class WordPress theme with over 700,000 users and a theme that I often use because of its user-friendly interface and feature-rich design tools.

Users of the Avada theme have access to professionally designed, pre-built websites to suit their business type, from hairdressers to electricians. Craig handed off a pixel-perfect Photoshop design for the new craft beer business website to be included in an upcoming Avada theme update. Using Avada’s theme option and design tools, I was able to replicate the design as a fully working website ready for deployment.