Web design & development

Thomas has worked in the UK, Australia and Thailand in various internet-related roles for more than 10 years now. He has technical experience as a web developer – including programming and graphic design – and has also worked as a project manager and account manager. In Thailand, he was a long term volunteer with Karen Human Rights Group (re-building their website & training staff), before forming his own organisation with a colleague Bordermedia, to work with Burmese refugee groups.

Times change: From laptop to notebook :-)

Times change: Laptop to notebook
Times change: Laptop to notebook

I finally did it! I got myself a computer that actually fits my lifestyle…a computer that you can actually carry with you – not drag after you. As it is evident from the website, I love to travel and have spent many years living and travelling abroad. One concern has always been: to bring my laptop or not to bring it (because of the size)?

My old lab top – an Acer Aspire 1362 weighs 3.5 kilos (without the wires, mouse, computer bag etc.). This makes it drag-able at best. I bought it eight years ago for 1.100$. It has a 516 MB memory and a storage of 40 GB. Two things have always bothered me about it: 1. Fan noise, 2. Weight – which did not suit my lifestyle at all. But still I can’t complain because it is still running after 8 years, which I think is pretty good.

So I have now finally bought myself a computer that fits my lifestyle. A notebook: Acer Aspire 1410. There is no fan noise, it has a memory of 2GB and a storage of 250 GB HDD, it merely weighs 1.4 kg and it cost me 550$.

So times change – from laptop to notebook: it suits my lifestyle and I am very happy 🙂

New English teaching website IVOZI launched!

Aprender Ingles con IVOZIAfter a couple of months of fairly strenuous work since I arrived back in Spain, we’ve finally launched the initial version of our new English teaching website Ingles.fm.

Geared towards the Spanish speaking world, we will over the next few months be creating a range of audio-visual products to compliment the Tools of Fluency package that James – my partner in Ingles.fm – has already put together.

It would be really appreciated if you could help us out by becoming a Facebook fan of ours, following us on Twitter, or buying one of our fabulous products ;-).

For those interested in the technical side of things, we’ve built the site in WordPress (2.8.5) using a modified version of the Thesis WordPress Theme from DIYthemes. Thesis takes the already fabulous framework of WordPress and turns it into a Ferrari ‘blogging’ platform, with great support for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) ‘out of the box’.

Apart from this we are using Paypal for payment processing and E-Junkie to manage our Digital Downloads and password protection.

Finally, we’ve put in an affiliate system so that anyone can join up, place links and banners on their blog/website to ivozi.com, and make 40% commission per sale. Please support us, and sign up today! It takes 5-10 mins of your time and you can even make money by posting an occasional link to our website from the likes of Facebook or MySpace. Find out how here.

Thanks!

New Earthoria website design

Welcome to our new look website! I’ve been buried in CSS Style sheets and the WordPress system for a couple of days now and have finally reached the point I feel relatively happy putting the new template live. Having had our previous layout for a whole year, we decided it was time for a change.

The intention was to make the site look a little more professional whilst keeping a clean & uncluttered look, and at the same time keep one eye on improving its search engine positioning.

We hope the new website will stand us in good stead to publish lots of new photos, podcasts, videos etc on our impending trip to Latin America.

Borderline website launch

Borderline Café, Shop & Gallery websiteI have recently been building a new website for an organisation called Borderline, based in Mae Sot, Thailand. The project comprises two stages, a main website, and a shop. You can view the main website by clicking here.

Borderline is a Café, Shop & Gallery based in Mae Sot, Thailand. It began with three women’s organisations seeking to establish a shared marketing space for women from Burma (living along the Thai-Burma border) to sell their hand made items. The women’s groups also hoped that by having a collectively managed market they would build their capacity for running income generation projects with the communities with which they work. In May 2004, the Borderline Women’s Collective opened.

Launch of a new donations website for Burma

Givetoburma.org - donate to BurmaLast Wednesday evening I received an appeal email from a Burmese friend, Su Su, in Chiang Mai. Following this, between 5pm Thursday and 5pm Friday I worked with Su Su to design, build and register a PayPal account and domain for the website www.givetoburma.org. We got it up online, and then raced to a Burmese support gathering at the Three Kings Monument in Chiang Mai.

They have taken about $1,500 dollars in the first 30 hours it has been live, and yesterday sent more than $1000 inside Burma straight to the monks that have been protesting. More soon…

Website design – Karen Human Rights Group

Karen Human Rights Website designKaren Human Rights Group (KHRG) are a small grass-roots organisation documenting the human rights situation of people in rural Burma. KHRG is the organisation I volunteered with when I arrived in Thailand in 2005.

I undertook a redesign and redevelopment of the KHRG website whilst working for KHRG, which began with an assessment of the current website – looking at its design, speed of download & visitor statistics. A series of documentation was drawn up including sitemaps & wireframe diagrams detailing the proposed new design & functionality. This was followed by full page mock-ups in Photoshop.

I developed this website in HTML and PHP with a MySQL database storing report information. Delivery of the website was followed up with several training sessions, and a training manual containing all the information required for KHRG to update and maintain the system themselves. You can visit the website by clicking here.