I was recently accepted as a member of the Chartered Institute for IT with Chartered IT Professional status (CITP).

CITP is the benchmark of excellence, and is a rigorously assessed, employer led standard…Holding Chartered status reflects your integrety, professionalism and dedication to your work.

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in Information Technology. Established in 1957, it is the largest United Kingdom-based professional body for computing, which was formally known as the British Computer Society.

With a worldwide membership of over 70,000 members in over 100 countries, BCS is a registered charity and was incorporated by Royal Charter in 1984. Its objectives are to promote the study and application of communications technology and computing technology and to advance knowledge of education in ICT for the benefit of professional practitioners and the general public.

BCS is a member institution of Engineering Council UK, and therefore is responsible for regulation of ICT and computer science fields within the UK. The BCS is also a member of the Council of European Professional Informatics Societies (CEPIS).

Finally the Sefton Court Hotel website has gone live and from the very first day of the launch the hotel began taking reservations from the online booking application instantly saving them ££££s in commissions!

I have just begun a major development project on behalf of Oakridge Online for one of their largest pharmaceutical clients. With an international team of consultants Oakridge will soon be delivering a blended training programme to a large number of deligates from the US, Sweden and UK with plans to pick up in Bangalore, Asia Pacific and Moscow.

Oakridge Online is based on the increasingly popular Course Management System or Virtual Learning Environment Moodle. The new 360 degree assessment tool that I am currently developing for Oakridge Training and Consulting integrates seamlessly with Moodle but if needed can be implemented as an entirely stand-alone application. Oakridge will be developing questions for the 360 degree feedback to support their Decision Making programme. The Feedback application however is being designed as a generic 360 degree feedback tool using the rating-scale question type typical of the 360 degree assessment model, so Oakridge Training and Consulting will be able to develop unique 360 degree assessments for all their future online programmes.

playpics is a new subscription website for teachers. This new educational resource offers a large library of original images designed specially to support the primary school curriculum.

The basis of this project involves a lot of image manipulation and database development while the later phases are to feature more web 2.0 online community functionality.

As this is a brand new venture I am unable to give too much away at this stage. But watch this space.

Launched on the 3rd of March 2009, japanga.co.uk is a new website for anybody crazy about Japanese pop culture. In particular anime art, J-pop and J-rock.

The ultimate goal of this website is to provide free, easy access to the greatest collection Japanese paraphernalia on the web. The site is still very young, so there is a long way to go.  However, I think it’s off to a good start with already more than 3,000 anime wallpapers! japanga.co.uk also provides access to information on more than 1,200 J-Pop and J-Rock artists including so far 23 videos and 41 free mp3 downloads.

The site uses a lot of database interaction for uploading and downlowding files, serving other dynamic content and tracking/recording user interaction. WordPress is used for the blog section and phpBB is used for the forums. There are a host of more interactive, social networking features planned and you can follow the development of this project on the Japanga Blog.

The Centre for Solar Energy Research is working on a Feasibility Study sponsored by the Welsh Assembly Government and hosted by Glyndŵr University. I was commissioned to develop a Joomla! theme based on the designs of Lucy Martin of Aristone Studio.

I also manage the domain name cser.org.uk and provide Joomla! support and training through my company Loquela.