Aaron Summers

Since joining AVVIO (Now SHR, part of the Access Group), I have restructured the website development side of the business. I started by developing a new parent theme, built on Gutenberg using Advanced Custom Fields. I also created extensive documentation and best practices for our internal and external agencies. I have also modernised their deployment and development processes using Github and Bitbucket for development and continuous deployment.

Google Lighthouse has also been at the forefront of my mind. I am achieving scores over 90% on performance for both mobile and desktop devices and 100% on best practices, accessibility, and SEO.
I am also responsible for project managing the websites and our developers and designers in Ireland, India, Spain and the US.

Working with the worlds largest health and beauty retailer, I am solely responsible for the production and maintenance of all WordPress blogs.

During my time with eLab, I’ve updated how their blogs are built, posts are written, and updates are performed. All blog themes are child themes built on my parent theme template, and this has decreased development time significantly as it allows for any update or new feature to be pushed across all business units. I’ve also been marked as overachieving numerous times during my time here.

I’ve also built eLab, a page builder, which has introduced a cleaner flow for the content team to create blog posts, publish products to the blog, create promotional adverts, add Ajax filtering and loading, build reusable WordPress patterns and more. Both my parent template and page-builder are currently being used on The Perfume Shop, Watsons, Ici Paris XL, Savers, Drogas and Kruidvat blogs. Superdrug and Marionnaud blogs are being released this year.

Because the company is spread across Europe and China, communication and organisation are crucial to the role. To aid with this, I built a WordPress project management tool. This allows for all of my work to be structured and not forgotten, daily and weekly reports to be produced and meetings highlighted.

During my time at Make Agency, working across multiple challenging, fast-paced websites build.

I have a wide variety of projects to work across, from responsive email templates, micro-sites to tremendous international website builds.

99% of the websites produced are WordPress based CMS websites. Every website is unique and is hand-coded from the ground up. Limiting external plugin abuse, each website is created off of a custom-built base theme using all the latest and best website practices.

During my time at make agency, I transformed the way websites are created and maintained by introducing version control for development and deployment, introducing Sass, removing the need for a wave of plugins that rely on external updates and server management introducing structure to their development process.

Working as part of an international team UK, US and Croatia, I was the sole front-end developer for the British side of the company. My first task when I joined UK2 was to rebuild the current UK2.net website. At this time, it was the largest project I had worked on, but this allowed me to increase my knowledge and practices rapidly.

I also hand-coded multiple e-commerce websites and blogs for the group using WordPress, including UK2.net, VI.net, 100tb.com and the uk2 group website.

As part of a small team, I was responsible for designing, building and maintaining over 100 4-6 page HTML microsites and the current 400+ page company website.

During this time, I helped increase the companies web presence and marketing exposure by creating HTML email newsletters and blog websites.

At Hurford Salvi Carr, I started to extend my coding knowledge by building my first WordPress website and plugin, which led to introducing PHP to develop further the ease of maintaining the numerous individual property development microsites.

Working as part of a high-pressured team, I designed and created bespoke public school websites in HTML, CSS and javascript. Once each project was completed, it was then integrated into a custom CMS system, allowing each school to add and edit content and images.

During my time at schoolwebsite I improved some of my organisational techniques, increased my coding knowledge and logical mindset.

I began my career by working freelance, offering my services free of charge to build up a portfolio of work and gain real-life development experiences.

It was a labour of love rather than something I had to do; I continued to learn with each challenge. This also helped develop my people/client management and taught me how to communicate code to a nontechnical individual.

Learning is, I think, the core of a good developer, the need to be in a constant forward momentum, improving skills and challenging one's self.