I worked on MeckOnline.com as a freelance project, working directly with Meck himself. DJ Meck is a number one selling pop DJ in the UK charts. He needed a web presence with specific tools, like a podcast, photo galleries, biography and a place to give the latest news on his goings-on. Along with designing and building the website, I completed a content management tool, allowing all the content on the site to be updated by him and his team. Including an MP3 upload tool for use with the podcast.
The European Auto Assault Website was the first full community site I designed since starting at NCsoft in late March 2005. It was also the first full site I had ever produced in multiple languages, in this case: English, French and German. The temperature guage at the top of the site was an idea that came about from the wanton desire to burn the entire thing. I got to implement over an over the top, ‘burning design’ with lots of heavy flash content, ahem, at the discretion of the user.
And if you’re half-clever, you might try turning the site up to 11…
Wet Breasts Challenge was essentially the same as the ‘Assess my Breasts’ website, with the only difference being - submitted entries had to be erm, wet. It was a special summer edition site, to coincide with a Nuts Magazine summer special and being the magazine that Nuts is - Wet T Shirt competitions, in summer come as standard. Once again, it seemed everyone wanted to upload pictures of their chests to the site which proved just as popular as before. Both websites stayed online for around a year (when the server crashed), receiving good web traffic throughout.
Assess my Breasts was the first of 2 websites for Nuts Magazine. It was essentially a version of one of the many, many ‘rate this’ websites, such as ‘Hot or Not’. You’d visit the site, see a randomly selected pair of breasts and then rate them between 1 to 10. Users could upload photos of their breasts to the site, and once approved - they’d appear.
The site was a massive success, appearing as a feature in a special ‘Breasts’ edition of Nuts and was promoted in the magazine a number of times. Literally thousands of people uploaded their breasts to the site. And I say ‘people’ because they weren’t all girls…
The Strongbow Rooms was a freelance project for NME.com, who were running a promotion with The Strongbow Rooms at a number of festivals through summer 2005. The basic idea of the game was Frogger, with a party goer and beer at a festival. A tight deadline meant it wasn’t as polished as I’d have liked, but it was well recieved none the less.
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This Spank the Gimp game was a freelance project completed late 2004 for Loaded Mens Magazine. It was aimed at promoting a special 'Girls in Rubber' supplement available with Loaded that month. The game was very successful, appearing in the Magazine itself and getting tens of thousands of hits on the loaded.co.uk website in a matter of weeks. I had fun making this game... And some of you may recognise my sister, Jemima Kiss - I recorded her vocal talents for the voice of the dominatrix character. And my friend, Paul Reeves (aka Reevo) was the real life model for the gimp himself, in body and voice. I should probably mention he doesn't normally dress up like a gimp, or speak much German (which I've been told is totally wrong anyway).
I worked at Designate for 11 months, from April 2004 until March 2005. Designate is based in Brighton and is an advertising and Marketing agency specialising in the Travel & Tourism industry. It was my first experience working for an agency, working under tight deadlines and working with those lovely things called timesheets.
By working with a diverse range of clients, I learnt many new skills including appreciation for web standards and accessibility, and a huge improvement on my general CSS abilities. I also gained more experience of online marketing and advertising, producing many HTML newsletters and online banners. Clients included SunStar Leisure (concept design), Pure Holidays (concept design), P&O ferries, Provident Financial, Cimtig, Best Western Hotels, Transavia and Family Assurance. It was excellent experience to work in a creative team after so many months freelancing.
Designate was full of great people, I made many good friends and I learnt much from my manager, David Bee who was inspirational to me throughout.
I worked at Virgin Radio from September 2002 until August 2003. I had a great year there. I made lots of friends, heard lots of great bands and met a fair share of celebrities. The one memory that stands out the most, is rather oddly, Badly Drawn Boy calling me a ‘clever fuck’ for explaining why helicopters can’t fly upside down. Well, at least that’s the story I always tell… The other memory that comes to mind is vomiting through a 2” wide window on the side of a minibus at about 2am coming back from V2002, but we won’t go in to that…
I learnt more about new media at Virgin Radio that I ever did at University. It was the ideal company to work for at a time when the web-boom had started fizzling and the web was slowly changing course. Working in a small in-house team, with the rather special James Cridland at the helm, we’d work primarily on www.virginradio.co.uk. Producing content for the website (image galleries, gig write ups and artist information pages) and work with the Sales & Marketing team to product promotional micro sites, which normally worked alongside on-air campaigns. 
The micro sites kept us busy most of the time, working in HTML and sometimes Flash. It was great working for such a wide range of clients, including: Nescafe, Miller Genuine Draft, Microsoft, McDonalds, The Australian Tourist Board, DVD promotions such as Fargo and The Royal Tenenbaums. As well as producing in-house micro sites for The Pete & Geoff Breakfast show and Ben Jones’ Rock Trumps.
There was room at times to work with other technologies and at Virgin Radio I first started writing my own Javascript and taught myself PHP. I designed and built Virgin Radios’ first chat room, which was used for the V2003 festival for people to discuss the things they were presumably missing, by being sat at home in front of their computer and not at the gig itself.
Other projects included producing a duplicate version of the Virgin Radio website, accessible only by Freeserve customers. An interactive CD for the Sales department, promoting the Pete & Geoff Breakfast show. The CD was sent out to potential sponsors of the show. HTML newsletters and online banners were also basic tasks but ones which I needed to learn.
One of my most satisfying projects was Liquid Radio. A flash site for a smaller online radio station that Virgin Radio ran. The site was built entirely in Flash, but was fully editable via XML. All its content was all updated externally and loaded in from a content management system. This was my first experience of XML in Flash and the skills I learnt were ones I went on to use again and again.
So yes. Those were my days at Virgin Radio. The place where I learnt how to drink…