foo.class

My name is George Paterson and i've been involved in web development since 2001 following it's progression from complex table design to semantic accessible designs.

I live in London and work for a company called Hotcourses which is a large publishing and web development company, with offices in South Africa and India.

I've built fooclass as a library of web development techniques combining both articles and raw demonstration code. It also lets people learn more about what i do and serves as a portfolio of my work.

Recent work

Over the past 2.5 years my work with Hotcourses has engaged me in the full life cycle of some of the major educational web sites in the UK and given the opportunity to train our new Indian development team. Below are three of the core Hotcourses sites that i have taken a lead role in developing.

Hotcourses

Hotcourses is the core site of Hotcourses Ltd, originally it was a tables based design but in 2006 it was completly redesigned to include community functionality for students.

I was a part of the redesign with Emma Clark, from the initial wireframes to it's release in November 2006 and i continue to be a part of the sites evolution with my new simplified grid home page being released soon.

Hotcourses uses a combination of PL/SQL and Java Struts for the backend and XHTML, CSS and Javascript for the front end.

Whatuni

Whatuni was a completely new site aimed at the University student market with the final phased of development to be released in the 3rd quater of 2007.

A site i have been involved at since it's inception, it allowed me to explore the use of video and and map functionality and as such it is my favorite site. It is also the first site to move away from PL/SQL and fully embrace Java.

There are of course some problem with the front end code that do not meet the specification i laid out in the prototype but these problems are to be resolved as part of the ongoing training i have given to our Indian development team.

Schoolsnet

Schoolsnet was the second site in the overhaul of Hotcourses sites, it serves secondary school education market with a community aspect that allows parents to interact.

Like Hotcourses it was built upon the original PL/SQL which i heavily edited and Java Struts which were developed by the Indian team based on prototypes of the site i developed.

Personal Site

fooclass

fooclass, my own personal site built using the Drupal framework with PHP and developed on a WAMP server. I built this site as an example of my work but also so i could create and collect useful articles on web design/development.

The development section will allow my to write useful code examples for other people to use. After training members of the Hotcourses Indian development team i realised the need to store this training online for ease of access.

Finally although i'm still working out some of the kinks with Drupal, creating my own site allows me complete control of the code and the opportunity to experiment.

Additional Sites

With Hotcourses i've been variously involved with a number of sites including:

• www.educationuk.org
• www.floodlight.co.uk
• www.learndirect-advice.co.uk
• www.hcstuff.com
• www.nextstep.org.uk

My involvement includes creation of new functionality, redesigning the user interface and day to day maintenance.