Everybody welcome, Simon Young, a front-end web developer from Manchester

With well over a decade of web development experience, Simon Young, a front-end web developer from Chester, England in the United Kingdom has a lot to say about his experiences to date in web design.

Even though he is selective at times with the work that he takes on he is highly skilled in WordPress, Magento and Ruby on Rails development and goes by the title of “Front-end web developer”.  Because of his experience he works on a number of projects with varying scopes from planning the build of an ecommerce site to doing layouts in CSS and XHTML.

Simon mentions how much the average project he is willing to take on which clears up a lot confusion when it comes to pricing out his services in this excerpt from his site…

“To set your expectations accordingly, in most circumstances (i.e. unless you are a charity or other volunteer project) I’m usually unable to work on projects with a budget of lower than £2000.”

Whether you are interested in working with him on your next web design project or you are interested to know more about what he does and how he got to where he is today feel free to read on and learn more about this well-versed web design professional…

Luc asks: Simon, since you first started about 12 years ago what are your favorite things that have happened in web design?

Simon says: I think the most significant development during this period has been the advancement of web standards and continued exploration as to what is possible in the browser. From a personal point of view, after many years of working on Microsoft technologies, in 2006 I moved to working on a Mac and mainly using open source web technologies such as WordPress, Rails and Magento.  In retrospect, I wish I’d done this a lot sooner as I’ve found the flexibility of open source and the ease of use of Mac are the perfect combination for web development.

Luc asks: I see that you do a fair amount of web development using Ruby, Magento Commerce and WordPress and I wanted to ask what is your favorite platform/framework to work with and why is it your favorite?

Simon says: The three all have very different strengths and weaknesses and so I go through phases of which I prefer although I would say now that 90%+ of my work is done on one of the three.  I love WordPress because it is the ideal content management solution for many small businesses and it’s incredibly feature rich these days.  Whilst there are lots of more complex CMS products on the market few are as instantly accessible and flexible and for many small businesses it’s likely to be all they will ever need to create a really solid online presence.

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Magento.  The feature set is phenomenal for an open source ecommerce project and there is very little that it can’t do out of the box or with an extension and the template system, while initially daunting, is incredibly powerful.  On the downside, the extensive feature set and powerful template system means there is a huge amount of lines of code within the project and so if something goes wrong or you really need to alter a small piece of functionality it can be tough to track down what you are looking for.

I think my favorite platform is Ruby on Rails and I use this for all of the web application builds I am involved in.  The concept of convention over configuration works really well for me and the in-built functionality is supplemented by so much great code in the community too.  I’m still really a beginner in many aspects of Rails but I just love the fact that every day you spend with it you come out at the end of the day with real progress and new knowledge.  Very few frameworks can offer you that!

Luc asks: As a front-end web developer fill in the blank about this sentence “_______ is the most important technology that i use as a front-end developer”

Simon says: “XHTML/CSS” is the most important technology that i use as a front-end developer.

Luc asks: I ask this of all front-end developers, do you prefer designing or developing (coding) websites and do you have any experience developing in the back-end or is your experience solely front-end development?

Simon says: I started off mainly on the design side as most sites were static when I first got in to the industry however now I find myself spending most of my time either coding layouts and integrating with WordPress/Magento or doing back-end development such as Rails.  I’d still class myself primarily as a front-end developer but I’m definitely picking up more back-end development experience at the moment.

Luc asks: Being a professional with more than 10 years of experience in the areas of web design and development are you more selective of which clients you take on or is anyone welcome?

Simon says: I’m selective to an extent.  I generally look out for clients who are going to be rewarding to work with and are keen to benefit from my expertise and with whom I can get along.  I like clients who pay on time too!

Luc asks: How much do you charge for an average project currently and what does this normally include?

Simon says: I don’t know that there is such a thing as an average project!  The charges will vary depending on whether I’m working through a larger digital agency in Manchester or London (where typically I’ll charge a day rate) or whether I’m doing a fixed price project for a small local business.  My involvement can be anything from just bringing PSD files to life as XHTML/CSS layouts right through to a full e-commerce plan, design and build.