I create bespoke, responsive websites for a wide array of clients.

Developing websites can be incredibly fulfilling. Taking a flat, motionless design and making it dynamic, interactive and most importantly work, is a great feeling. On the other side of this though, is the hours and hours of unnoticed work that go into making the front end experience for the user as seamless as possible.

Whether it's optimising images, reducing load times, speeding up a process or augmenting for high-resolution screens, these are all details that don't tend to be noticed when they're good, but stand out like a sore thumb when they're poor. That's why I spend a lot of time making every site as close to perfect as possible across desktop, tablet and mobile.

A common requirement with modern business requires the ability to allow multiple systems to communicate with one another. This could be something simple such as pulling a feed from another site and displaying it on your page, or it could be the use of an API (Application Program Interface) to extend functionality of your website by combining features of another application. An example of this being the use of the Right Move API to integrate with Wordpress, so that properties are synchronised between the two portals. APIs are commonly used in eCommerce systems as well.

In the second quarter of 2015 alone, ecommerce was estimated to be worth $84 billion. It's an industry that's growing at an amazing rate, and if you have a business that sells products, but not online, then it's not difficult to argue that you're missing out on a huge chunk of the market.

Having said that, simply having an online store means very little without sales. That's where I hope to come in and help you develop the perfect online store for your customers. A lot of people get into the trap of developing for what they like, but I like to make it more scientific than that, by looking at purely in terms of facts and figures. What do consumers like? How do they interact with elements of a store? How is the experience different from mobile to tablet to desktop? Everything I do, I do for a reason and it's backed up by results.

As part of website optimisation, support for all the major browsers (and versions) is incredibly important. For example, Internet Explorer prior to version 10 is lacking in support for some major features, such as animations (which you'll see if you compare this site between IE9 and say, Google Chrome).

Where the issue arises, is supporting a feature for modern browsers, can actually break a site altogether on an older browser. It's therefore necessary to create fallbacks for these browsers by specifically targeting them. When you have multiple browsers and versions, this is no small task, but none the less it's something that I undertake with every project I take on.

Legacy browsers are also supported with some features to ensure that the still functions on a basic level to get your message across, although with a browser such as Internet Explorer 8 (which has been abandoned by Microsoft) there will be integrated messages to inform a user to upgrade their browser, with a link as to how they should do it. A user won't be left in the dark as to why their site isn't working, and they'll be educated on the reasons for moving over to a browser that supports modern styles and functionality.

Of course, the browser checklist wouldn't be complete without considering mobile browsers for the likes of iOS and Android. These are designed around the fact they'll work on touch screen devices, so functionality changes again from the desktop versions. Using media queries and javascript, any compatibility issues are dealt with.

Performance and usability also goes beyond providing a better user experience. As of April 2015, Google are now ranking website performance and having a responsive website as key parameters as to where your site is ranked on their search engine.

These could literally be the difference between being on the first page or the second. Being the 10th result (i.e. still on page one) compared to the 11th (top of page two) equates to double the amount of click through traffic.

The first page of Google equates to 94% of clicks, the second page equates to 6%.Keywords are still important, but they're no longer the only parameter that matters.

It's surprising how many sites I come across that have no optimisation setup at all. Investing a bit of time to reduce image sizes, condense and compress files and organise the site structure to load faster, can go a really long way, and not just on the SEO front.

Typically, when a user lands on a website, you have between 10 and 20 seconds to engage them before they leave. When you consider this time also includes loading times, it becomes even more crucial to have your site served as quickly as possible. If your site takes 10 seconds to load, you could be losing customers straight off the bat! Through various different techniques and custom scripts, i've developed a way to ensure that your site will load quickly and efficiently, giving you as large a window of opportunity as possible.

The last part of the puzzle is to use analytics to measure everything that your site is doing, from number of visitors, to what pages they're viewing, where they've visiting from and what devices they're using to view the site. Using these analytics, you can then figure out what you're doing well and where you're not quite as successful, you can improve upon those areas. It's undoubtedly the best way to measure success.