About

This is the personal website / blog of David Little, a web designer /developer based in London with over 8 years’ experience of building websites.

Over the years I’ve had experience of most aspects of creating websites from discussing requirements to design, development and even content creation. At the moment I’m a full-time web developer working principally with the Plone CMS.

I’ve got a wide range of skills but my main interests lie in UI design and development, site building, training and documentation. I’ve got a solid background in front-end web technologies and can also speak Python, although I make no claim to being a first class programmer; some days you might find me tweaking caches, others delving around in Photoshop and Flash.

I’ve written lots of documentation (the majority of it on Intranets) and trained many people in maintaining their websites. I’ve always been interested in UI and am currently formalising this by studying a course on UI design and evaluation. I’m also working with the Out of the Box Plone Themes group to produce alternative generic designs for Plone.

In summary, my main skills are:

Plone (and Zope) integration/development with ZPT, Python, DTML and KSS.
Front-end development using XHTML, CSS and Javascript, including libraries such as jQuery
Back-end development with XML/XSLT and PHP (less of that these days, although I have been known to play around with Wordpress)
Web design: I’m not shy of Photoshop and dabble with Flash sometimes
Documentation
Training: I’ve trained many many people in how to use their Zope and Plone-based websites
Discussing requirements with users

I’m currently updating my CV.

Obviously, any views or ideas expressed on this site are mine only and do not necessarily reflect those of organisations I am working or have worked for.

Offline

I also have various offline interests. These vary from time to time but at the moment include:

Photography

I really enjoy photography. Doesn’t mean I’m particularly good at it mind.

Languages

I’m particularly interested in Germanic languages (I’m trying to learn a bit of Norwegian at the moment) and speak to varying degrees of competency:

German: my strongest language. Learned this at school and have been studying it again over the last few years. I’ve recently completed a one-year German Proficiency course at Birkbeck, University of London
French (learned it for years from a young age so, although it’s a bit rusty it’s still there somewhere!)
I’ve learned a bit of Spanish, Portuguese and Italian so have an ok reading knowledge of Romance languages
I learned a bit of Russian years ago but can just about remember the alphabet
I did a very brief course in Japanese a couple of years ago but have forgotten everything. Nevertheless I think it’s a great language!

Writing

Over the years I’ve done academic writing, including an article for the New Dictionary of National Biography on the cartoonist William Haselden (whom I wrote my MA thesis on); writing for the Web (I used to write for the website fancyapint); technical writing and documentation; and most recently had a go at creative writing.

Reading

Particularly novels, short stories, politics and history.

Cycling

In my spare time and on interesting routes, not to and from work that’s for sure.

Walking

Out in the country. I’m the admin for a Flickr group called Time Out Country Walks — for photos from walks featured in the walking books published by Time Out.

Music

Have a look at my Last.fm profile to see what I’ve been listening to rather than me repeating it all here.

Wildlife

I’m interested in wildlife which I occasionally try to combine with interest in photography, although at the moment this doesn’t extend much beyond feeding and photographing the birds in my back garden.

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