About Michael Wood
With over a decade of experience working in web design, development and publishing Michael Wood offers his services to companies on a project by project basis as a freelancer, augments a business’s offering as a contractor and, on occasion, has worked full time.
The Full Time
Having given up a life of working in the pension department of Provident Financial Group in Bradford I decided to try make a job out of my hobby fiddling with websites and joined Batley based business report website company Corporate World working as a web programmer building sites from a traditional designer’s work. Moving onwards and upwards I joined upcoming Leeds agency Zestmedia as the Head of dHTML Development.
To this day I have little understanding of the job title but in practical terms I took two or three design outlines and made them into a full website. During this time I closely with the likes of Wembley National Stadium, Green Flag, Bic (The Biro People) and Traveller’s Protection Services. Zestmedia’s success saw the company sold and merge with Sheffield’s Quba and I took the opportunity to establish my own business, Cabin Pressure.
Cabin Pressure worked with local businesses and communities to design, build and develop websites for the likes of Fernside Marshall and The Queensbury Village while augmenting the offering of other businesses to work on websites like The Stuncroft Group and Pashina. After some years I was offered a position in the newly reformed Poulters Digital Department as the Lieutenant to the new Head of Digital.
The multi-faceted Poulters advertising agency provided a full service to clients allowing me to work with Manchester United (again), Harris Tweed and William Hill allowing me to involve myself in the broader world of advertising including public relations, direct marketing and pure creative work. During this time I worked on specific social network projects for Portsmouth FC, Motorcycle News and Total Golf magazine.
Poulters, sadly, was closed down after a hostile takeover and I took a position at Leeds' travel specialist Zolv working mainly on the Virgin Holiday website before returning to Cabin Pressure and finding my own way.
- The best thing about a full time job is that it lets you shape work with a client over years. It lets you set some long term aims - high aims - and go after them.
The Contractor
Two lengthy contracts stand out as showing the value and benefit I bring to companies.
In in 2005 I spent three months at Manchester’s Photolink advertising Agency working with their high profile clients such as Manchester United, Chelsea FC, The Office of The Deputy Prime Minister, Littlewoods and The Home Delivery Network. During my time at Photolink I trained the web design staff with using pure CSS layouts and was offered a position which, sadly and because of geography, I turned down.
At Sheffield’s Technophobia I was offered a job but again turned it down offering my services as a contractor and starting a productive and ongoing partnership which has bloomed since the summer of 2009. Working with Technophobia clients such as Alfa Romeo, Derry City Council, HCA and Green Flag as well as UK Government projects bringing my expertise in User Interface design to some projects, my abilities building standards based XHTML to others and my consultancy experience for project defining and definition.
A role at Lloyds Bank which lasted some seven months gave me an insight into the workings of a huge company while three months at CAP in Leeds allowed me to dictate and deliver a technology project using HTML5.
Other contract roles have been shorter and productive as I bring my wide range of abilities to augment a company’s offering.
- I like contracting because of the different challanges it brings. One day you are building HTML5 apps, the next designing a new way to use a major website. This makes it always interesting, so it is always fun.
The Freelance
Running from 2004 to 2008 and from 2009 onwards Cabin Pressure was used as a catch all term — and trading as name — for my freelance projects while have including projects such as like BMB, The Stuncroft Group, JLA, Queensbury Village, LG Retail and Peekabooz.
Each project brings a different level scope and involvement from the pure consultancy of recommending how best a business can pursue an online strategy to all encompassing website design, development, build and deployment along with putting into place a media strategy post-launch. Branding design, press release writing, Internet policy creation — All things which have been a part of the broad remit of my freelance work.
Examples of this include the summer of 2010 when West Yorkshire Laundry specialist JLA contacted me with designs asking for a content management system building to create a website from. Contrasting that LG Retail had a product to sell and a system to sell it with but needed a design and rebrand to push them to the fore of the marketplace.
It is easy for the Freelancer to come over as an expert in everything and that would be wrong but what is true is that when running a variety of involvements in a variety of projects one gets exposure to everything, and learn much.
- Freelance is great when you get the one-to-one relationship with a client you share the aims of. Great things come from that.