History of Ben
Hi my name is Ben, I am *insert ridiculous number here* years old and I live in England. I enjoy building websites and im lucky enough to do it for a living.
I taught myself HTML and CSS back in the day by downloading websites like the BBC and the changing the code to see what happened, this method of trial and error actually taught me quite a lot and was a very easy way of getting into basic development.
For A-Levels I studied IT (B), Business Studies (C), Product Design (C) and General Studies (D), and it was at this point I knew I would end up in web development.
At University (UCE in Central Birmingham) I did a degree in ‘Information Systems with Multimedia’ and achieved a 1st Class Grade with Honours and then I got into the real world with a position at 3Sixty Displays, building their website along with other marketing material. Once this project had finished I began contracting at npower and I enjoyed it so much I went permie about 18 months later.
I have been at npower for around 4 years now and am now a Senior Front End Developer helping to shape the way the future npower website will look and function.
Experience
npower | Senior front end web developer | 2011 – present
Liaising with business owners and working with other senior developers to try and push the website into new technologies also helping with creating a user guide/manual for the npower.com website.
npower | Front end web developer | 2007 – 2011
Building landing pages, micro sites, project work and general websites updates. Work as part of a front end team and work closely with back end programmer and business analysts.
3 Sixty Displays 2007 – 3 months
Built a web presence for 3 Sixty Displays along with other marketing material, this included logo and company presentation CD.
Spanish Country Cottages 2008 – 3months (Freelance)
Built all the XHTML and CSS for this Spanish property project, still make small updates to the website.
Missing Ink Studios 2009 – 3 months (Freelance)
Worked on a children’s website integrating my XHTML and CSS with Jquery and .net
Education
Bsc Hons Degree from University of Central England (now Birmingham City University) – 1st Grade in Information Systems and Multimedia.
4 A Levels – B grade in ICT, C grade in Product Design. South Bromsgrove 6th Form College.
11 GCSE’s – Grades from B to D from South Bromsgrove High School.
Interests
I consider myself to be a very active person, I go to the gym pretty much every day of the week doing a mixture of weights and boring old cardio. I also play in a 5 a side team which has its ups and downs, literally, relegation one season and promotion the next. I’m also a big follower of premiership football and am often called a glory hunter so I’ll let you guess which team I actually support. During the summer I try to play as much golf as possible and as I’m not particularly good at it I certainly get my monies worth from a typical round.
I am also into cars, movies and music, currently loving the American Anthems compilation.