What I do

As a communicator I believe:

My job is to improve the way clients get their messages across to the people who are important to them.
A successful organisation communicates well with its stakeholders — customers, employees, shareholders and the community at large. As a leader and communicator in your organisation, you need to be satisfied you communicate clearly with the people you want to influence, and that you are being understood.
There are a myriad of ways organisations communicate, from informal face-to-face exchanges to formal multi-channel programmes. Technological advances help us communicate with more people more rapidly. At the same time, people are receiving more information. It makes it all the more vital that we tell our story — whatever it may be — in a way that is clear, consistent and compelling.

I can help you:

• clarify the communications opportunity arising from a particular business or organisational need
• understand the characteristics and the environment of your intended audience. Who are they? What’s important to them? What are their expectations? What are their needs?
• devise an overarching communication strategy or develop clever concepts to make a single piece of communication effective
• implement the solution, and
• develop ways to measure its effectiveness.

My experience

I have an extensive background in professional communication. During nearly thirty years in the industry, I have been employed as a journalist, editor, designer, publisher, communications strategist and media manager. I have worked as an independent private communications consultant based in Wellington since 2000. During this time I have completed a variety of contracts for corporate, local and central government, and not-for-profit organisations.

I have a particular passion for cross-cultural communication and have relished the challenges presented by the extensive work I have done throughout the Pacific, as well as the work I have done with different cultural groupings within New Zealand.

Another key interest area of mine is early childhood development and parental education and support. I believe the health and well being of families of all cultures, ethnicities, religions and compositions is crucial. I enjoy the challenges of meeting the communications needs of this complex audience to deliver essential messages.

Through my long association with not-for-profit and non-government organisations, I have extensive experience in providing creative communications solutions to organisations facing extreme pressures — shrinking budgets, technological lags and changing expectations of society, to name a few.

In a voluntary capacity, I am on the board of the Wellington Youth Orchestras Inc. Responsibilities include sponsorship negotiation, event planning and management, mentoring and nurturing young musicians and working with highly-strung artists to achieve maximum results. Coupled with this I am also responsible for managing creative advertising and promotion campaigns on a shoestring. In a pro bono capacity, In a pro bono capcity, I am also the Communications advisor for the Nikau Foundation, preparing newsletters, annual reports and promotional material to assist this charitable community foundation.

I have worked for the Montessori Preschool Association, Red Cross New Zealand, Play Centre Association, Plunket, Suzuki Music New Zealand, DARE programme (Drug Alcohol Resistance Education), the Wel-Com Editorial Board and have served on the Board of Trustees of Long Bay Primary School. I am currently a member of the Youth Orchestra Advisory Board.

What I Do

Since graduating in 2006, I have developed a good working knowledge of – and experience with – php, javascript and jQuery. I am also confident working with and modifying systems already in place. I have significant experience with WordPress and am comfortable creating themes and plugins as well as setting up and maintaining wordpress instances. However, as a programmer based in New Zealand, I am aware that such large sites can be frustrating on slower networks, and cms's like WordPress with heavy javascript and css files can add significantly to the size and performance of a site. As such, I have experience creating small static sites where the need arises, adding on dynamic content as and where needed.

I have invested significant energy in ensuring sites I work with are compatible with numerous device types. We live in a mobile age, and I believe that a site needs to work seamlessly on computer, tablets and phones to truly be functional. As such I have experience creating responsive styling for websites, ensuring a consistent, functional version is available for any device people may want to use.

I have some skills with regards to design itself. I have access to the full adobe design suite, and am familiar with Photoshop and inDesign, however my main skillset lies with programming, development and functionality design.

Digital security is something that interests and concerns me. I am aware that this is an increasing issue for all sites as even the perception of a security breach can negatively reflect on a sites reputation and profitability. I work hard to keep up to date on the fast moving area of digital security and have attended conferences and workshops on this topic. I work hard to make sure the websites I produce are as secure and safe as possible.

My experience has also included developing skills with sysadmin work. We have the facilities here at eBorne to host a site and manage the server and it's upkeep. We generally bill this at around $20 per month for smaller sites, with variable rates for larger sites with more requirements.

What I believe

I feel that jobs should be completed to a high standard, and should be properly tested and functional before release. However, I am also realistic in what this can entail and am aware of issues such as feature creep, and perfectionism. I try to make sure at the start of every project, a clear set of requirements are set out and agreed upon, as well as a clear timeline of when these requirements are to be completed by, and what should happen if there are delays.

This involves working out what are the basic, minimum requirements for the project to go live and establishing these as the top priority. Then going through all other features and ideas and labelling them with values of importance, and time, allowing us to get a firm idea of what will be necessary for the project. We then use this to establish a timeline for the features with checkpoints along the way to ensure milestones are being met as agreed. This involves a regular meeting with the client to further ensure that what is being built matches up with the expectation of what the client wants.

As a developer, I also believe it is my professional obligation to not just follow to the letter what the client wants, but to use my experience to help guide them to what it is they are really after for their product, and together to find the best way to go about getting that for them. This I feel is very important, as a lack of understanding, or assumptions about other ideas can cause projects to fall into stagnation and endless development.

Studying psychology, I also learnt a number of research methods and techniques which I use to help evaluate programs, deliver clever visual designs and I know how to create and evaluate scientific data and studies.

Programs are people oriented. Programs are written by people, for people. So the better I understand people and the way they work, the better I will be able to design and write programs both for people using programs, and with people developing programs.

What I have done

After graduating with a degree in computer science and psychology I worked at Catalyst It in Wellington, but after a year I felt that web development at that time was not quite suited for me. Over the last few years however, the web frontier has evolved rapidly in both quality and innovation such that I could no longer resist the lure of possibilities that existed out there. During my absence from development, I worked in more design oriented fields such as book, pamphlet, magazine and business card design. While I enjoyed this work, and felt I learnt much from it, I really feel now that software and web development is where I am best suited. The time working in design has ended up greatly contributing towards this work as I now not only have access to a wider range of knowledge and tools for design/development, I feel I now have a better idea of why design is so important, and how to better integrate it into the work I do. I have a better understanding of the psychology of communication and how the initial and ongoing discussion of the clients’ objectives is crucial to delivering a solid solution.

Since getting back into serious web development I have worked on refurbishing a major wordpress site Coffee Hogs, which I re-themed to be completely responsive, and improved and enhanced on its interactive functionality. This envolved significant clientside PHP, Javascript and Jquery coding, as well as a server-side php and good knowledge of mySQL and how wordpress/php interacts with it.

I also made the e-borne.co.nz website utilising Bootstrap and HTML Boilerplate to create a website that is fast, responsive and compatible across many devices.

I am in the market now for more web development work, and am eager and willing to learn more about what opportunities and technologies this can entail.