About Paul Silver

These are some of the projects and websites I've been involved with:

Lawrecruiter (with G2Blue)

Lawrecruiter is a recruitment portal for the legal industry in the UK. I worked with the group starting Lawrecruiter to create the main public website, internal sales intranet, and embedded results within partners websites. It is by far the largest website I have worked on as a developer and wrote all of the code apart from a reporting suite written by a developer working with me in the summer of 2003.

The Lawrecruiter project was tackled by myself and web designer David Andrew. We worked very closely with our clients, and took their original specification and re-wrote it in to a document that described a website that would both work and be possible to create. We then worked out timescales for the project and set to work on the creation. While David handled the design, I tackled the large amount of development required to create the large site.

Since initial launch in early 2003 I have worked closely with Lawrecruiter to add and change elements of the working website.

1. The main website

   The Lawrecruiter website is built around ease of use for visitors who may not use the internet very often. Central to the website is the job search facility, which allows candidates to quickly find the job they want in the area they are interested in.

   The clients had a strong idea of how they wanted Lawrecruiter to look and work, and David and I worked within these to create a useable and flexible website. Features of the site include:

   • Private client and candidate areas
   • Saved searches and jobs by e-mail, with easy sign-up
   • Secure store for CVs and other documents
   • Website will remember which vacancies you have previously applied for
   • Search results caching system to reduce database accesses
   • On-line client account sign-up
   • Nearby vacancies when nothing found in local area

2. The sales intranet

   The intranet has two tasks: to act as a contact manager for the sales staff in the company, and to provide admin functions to control various properties of the main website.

   Facilities available in the contact manager were based on a software package the manager of Lawrecruiter had used in the past, with some improvements to meet the requirements of an on-line business. The contacts database was pre-loaded with information bought from a third party.

   The website administration sections allow control over what options are available for searching and placing vacancies on the site, what time limits trigger job expiry and the various other variables a complex website has running in the background.

3. Embedded 'powered by Lawrecruiter' search

   Lawrecruiter wished to be able to offer their vacancy database through partner websites. They needed the ability to easily add Lawrecruiter searches and results to their websites, and to be able to re-brand the design to match the look and feel of the website it was being embedded within.

   I re-worked the vacancy search code and design to set all colouring, images and blocks of content so they could be changed within a CSS file provided to Lawrecruiter partners. By changing the CSS the partner can quickly change the colouring of the various elements of the pages, and change buttons and fonts so they fit in with their own designs.

   Embedding can happen in a variety of ways:

   • Content pulled from Lawrecruiter server to their own (e.g. YSG)
   • Frames based (e.g. Scottish Law Online)
   • Hosted search (e.g. Legal Day

Skillsearch (with G2Blue)

Skillsearch is an IT recruitment company based in Brighton, UK. They specialise in certain niche technology areas including Peoplesoft and Human Resources / Customer Relationship Management services.

The brief for the website was very loose, but we knew it needed to appeal to a technical audience, and be designed to rank well in search engines in a very competitive marketplace. I worked with David Andrew (design) and Rosie Freshwater (search engine optimisation) to create the site in a short timespan. David created a design using many CSS techniques to help with search engine optimisation and I used some extra programming techniques to cut out extra white space created by ColdFusion in the source code web spiders read.

The site we created includes the following technologies:

• Search engine optimised design
• Vacancy searching and application
• Simple CMS for text on Infocentre pages
• Bookmarkable searches
• RSS Feeds of searches for use in aggregators

Also at G2Blue

While I was at G2Blue I also worked on websites for G2 Legal, a national legal recruitment company, Goodies, who make organic baby food, and Tourist Net UK, working on their hotel contact system.

Eurolink

I worked for Eurolink Consulting / EurolinkGlobal (now Aristotle Corp) during 1999 and 2000, creating a dynamically driven website and intranet for their offices around the UK, with additional scripts to allow easy integration of jobs from their Australian offices.

Their website has changed since I worked at Eurolink, but the core job search system I wrote still survives under an updated new interface.

The Eurolink website included:

• Intranet including telephone directory, sales tools, searchable archives of CVs, vacancy posting and handling
• Vacancy search and search results by e-mail
• Publication of jobs to relevant Usenet newgroups

Whilst at Eurolink I created on-line and off-line sales material in Photoshop, Illustrator and Powerpoint. I was also involved with interviewing graphic designers and a web developer to fill my post.

Other web software

I've also written:

• A spider and processor that retrieves CVs from the web and internal documents, then matches them to jobs entered on an intranet
• Web log merger to make one log file out of those created by a set of clustered servers. This was to avoid having to pay a higher price for software that could analyse two separate logs holding records for the same time periods. This was first written in ColdFusion, but when the size of the files being handled became too large for ColdFusion it was re-written in Perl.

Programming languages

Most of my programming has been done in ColdFusion (v4.5, 5 and MX.) I've also done projects in ASP (server-side Javascript), PHP and Perl. Most of the dynamic websites I've written have used Microsoft SQL server as a database (v6 and 2000), apart from the PHP projects which have used MySQL (v3.23)

Non-programming

At G2Blue I was working with Rosie Freshwater, a search engine optimisation (SEO) and e-marketing expert, and have since become very interested in SEO. I've used various search engine friendly techniques in building this website, and have very good results for the technical and mechanical articles written here. I hope to be able to use this knowledge a lot in the future.

I do quite a bit of 'networking' of the social and business rather than wiring sense. I'm a member of Ecademy and the Brighton Farm, and often go to Silicon Beach and Brighton New Media events. Networking can sometimes feel like a thankless task, but I find it has benefits if you can keep plugging away at it long-term.

Before plunging in to web development, I did some web design (starting in 1995) and worked for some charities for the visually impaired in Brighton, including simultaneously holding down five jobs at Brighton Society for the Blind. At BSB I was mainly a fund raiser, having gone there to help them make a website, I was asked to write their Annual Report, then stay on to help them find money, fix the computers, write reports and the various other tasks that keep a charity running.