A brief history of Richard Knight

I haven’t always been in web development. Actually, that’s only partially true.

Since the age of about 17, during my college years I’ve dabbled. My introduction to this weird and wonderful world came when I had a bright idea one day that somebody should make a website where people who were looking for band members could find people looking for bands (keep in mind this was 2005 which was 1 year after Facebook launched and 2 years after MySpace).

Not being one to sit around and wait for somebody else to reap the rewards of my brilliant idea, I went online and purchased a sort of pre-made/cookie cutter dating website.

Knowing nothing whatsoever about any of this stuff I started breaking it all down and working out how it was all put together. Before long I’d discovered that is was written in something called ‘PHP’, or at least all the bit that needed to change were, the images could be swapped fairly easily and I’d even managed to pick up a little HTML and CSS to swap some colours around.

At the time I was studying a BTEC National diploma in Multimedia at Stafford College. I probably wasn’t the best student, but I tried hard and I’d got it in my head that I was going to be a designer.
After I slapped a logo I made on my new shiny website (band-mates.co.uk), there was just one thing missing to get it working just the way I wanted it. That was a search function.

This part of it I couldn’t work out at all, so I went and spoke to the web design lecturer at the college, who told me that if he was quoting me as a client, you’d be looking at £1000.

Obviously I couldn’t afford that, but it got me thinking, shortly after I successfully monetized my website and maintained it for some time with paid memberships before eventually shutting it down.

What happened next?

Despite finishing college and going on to graduate with a BSc Honors in computer games design, I never stopped perusing web development. After struggling to find an opening into the games industry a careers advisor asked me if I could learn something else where there was higher demand.

I ended up getting a job in which I could use both my Graphic design and my web development skills. Despite moving between a few different job over the years I’ve now built up around 12 years of experience.

What do I actually do now?

Rather than confining myself to one area of expertise, instead I consider myself a full stack developer these days. Often I will mix up use of PHP, Javascript, HTML and CSS in both a frontend and backend capcity. Primarily I work with Symfony as a PHP framework and jQuery as a Javascript library, however recently I’ve been having a dabble at getting into React JS as well.

The past couple of years have led me to really get into cloud architecture using both the Amazon AWS and the Microsoft Azure platforms, as well as server design and version control/deployment pipelines through GitHub and App services.

So what makes me different from everybody else out there?

Well, I believe that it’s my problem solving abilities and solution design. Being a self confessed jack of all trades, I get to see projects from a variety of angles which others perhaps don’t. Something I really pride myself on is being able to fully understand the problem faced by a client or user.
When I can experience that same problem myself, it helps me create a solution that not only works well, but also looks good and feels good to use.

What sort of things have I worked on?

Currently, at the time of writing I have several long term projects which I manage in varying capacities.
These range from the creation, development and up-keeping of:

• A multi-million pounds per year website for a global distribution brand.
• An international franchised business with hundreds of staff using a bespoke client tracking system.
• Multiple e-commerce sites for companies ranging from start-ups to established and industry leading businesses
• Other assorted bespoke tools created in conjunction with well-know people withing the SEO and UX community

What can I do for you?

In a nutshell, I’m a facilitator or tools and automation. My strongest set of skills has become an uncanny ability to take manual processes that require a lot of time, effort and money, to transform them into ideally automated workflows, otherwise much more simply and user-friendly tools.

I like to take on a challenge and use my problem solving skills to work out an elegant solution for them.

In general I tend to either work with small or medium sized businesses who don’t have the technical ability or know-how already. However more frequently I’m finding larger businesses also require the same set of services.