Ashfield Web Dev
High Performance Web Development
I provide web solutions for a wide range of needs, whether you are a recent graduate looking for a professional portfolio to kickstart your career, a business looking for a new site to reach your customers, or you want your existing site updated in anyway.
What do I do?
I offer as range of creative digital solutions to suit your unique needs and requirements.
WordPress Website Creation
Get the perfect customised WordPress site to impress clients and employers. WordPress is an industry leading content management system (CMS) which will allow your to update and edit your site after creation easily, and have access to 1000s of plugins to help your site meet any requirement.
I have developed multiple professional WordPress sites for clients and can help you achieve the perfect look and feel.
Whether you are a graduate looking for a show stopping portfolio and blog to impress employers, a business looking to get their name out there or someone looking to start an e-commerce store using WooCommerce.
Regular Website Development
Want a blazingly fast site customised to your particular requirements? Whether it is a simple 'save the date' for an event, or a more complex portfolio.
I have plenty of experience with modern web technologies including HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP.
Web Maintenance
If you need your site updated in anyway, I am able to help bring it inline with your needs. I am able to work with WordPress sites, regulate HTML sites and ExpressionEngine sites.
Need something else?
If you are not sure what service you need or have something else in mind, feel free to get in touch so we can work on a solution together, everyones needs are different and I want to help you.
What I know
I have experience in the main web technologies: HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but also additional experience in PHP, SASS/SCSS and Python.
I have some experience in VueJS, JQuery, Svelte and Typescript.
I have used the Foundation 6 Frontend Framework extensively along with experience on Bulma, Materialize and Bootstrap.
I have worked extensively with WordPress, including WooCommerce, Advanced Custom Fields Pro, Elementor, WPBakery (Formally Visual Composer) and Timber/Twig.
I have some experience in Node and Express using mySQL databases. I have some experience using PHP Slim 3 to make API back ends.
HTML 5
CSS 3
CSS is another core technology behind every site, this is used to make websites beautiful and style the content on the page.
Javascript
SASS/SCSS
PHP
WordPress
Python
MySQL/SQL
Who am I?
My name is Michael Ashfield and I am a web developer. I am a final year student of Web Design & Development at Solent University Southampton, and have also taken a year out of university to work at T&S Advertising in Bristol as a placement web developer.
As a final year student at Solent University, I have dove deep into my studies, learning new and important technologies, tools and workflows in my own time and using those tools to add to my assignments. I also have A levels in ICT, Computing and a BTEC in Business studies.
Based in Southampton
Southampton, situated in the centre of the south coast, is part of Britains growing south coast tech hub, with great links to London and Bristol.
Ellactiva was built by me from the ground up while working fulltime at T&S Advertising. This site was a full ecommerce solution built using WordPress and WooCommerce with a custom theme that used the Foundation 6 Framework.
Building the site was an excellent learning oppotunity, not only did I have the chance to learn to work with WordPress Blocks/Gutenberg, as it was being rolled out while I was developing the site, I also got to learn large parts of the WordPress ecosystem as I developed the backend of the site.
I got the chance to learn and use the PHP Symfony frameworks ‘ Twig ‘ template engine, via the Timber plugin, this helped me build elegant and reusable components on the backend and sped up the speed of development. Using Timber with the Advanced Custom Fields plugin allowed for easy customisation of the template for the client from the admin interface.
This site included a fair amount of JavaScript development, as features such as the Mailchimp integrated email signup forms, which helped me gain a more practical understanding of webhooks and APIs. I got the chance to work with cookies to develop a custom cookie management system, not only helping me learn how to effectively handle cookies through code but also some of the legalities behind the use of cookies.
I got to work with developing custom HTML emails that used data from WooCommerce to give customers visually impressive confirmation and ‘thanks’ emails to improve the ratio returning customers, this was my first chance to work with HTML emails and gave me the skills to develop stunning emails that work across a broad range of devices and mailboxes.Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
Working Wonders Join Us was partially built and I was tasked to finish it while at T&S. The site was to serve as an onboarding site for new staff and the site was built using WordPress with the Timber and Foundation framework. After a short while examining the code I was initially given I was quickly able to adapt to the methods the previous developer had used and start working on the site.
The site used Gravity Forms , a WordPress plugin, to provide the form for users to complete, having conditional options depending on the selections from the user. After it was completed form would be saved for a admin to download as a password protected PDF, and the admins would be notified weekly via a custom cron email informing them how many un-deleted entries they have yet to sort.
The site gets data from an XML based jobs list and shows users the available jobs. This is managed through a cron job which gets all the currently available jobs and stores them to show to the user, even if the API is down. Building this system taught me a great about about working with XML, APIs and storing data in PHP and WordPress and helped me in later sites that I would build.
Timloc was already made and had been running for awhile before I was given the project to learn how to use the ExpressionEngine 2 content management system in order for me to be able to maintain the site and make updates and improvements. Learning the system was somewhat of a challenge as the Timloc site had quite a number of extensions and ExpressionEngine 2 is an older version, so there was little help outside of the main documentation, however I managed to get an understanding of the system and was able to make the modifications required.
One task involved me having to convert their old newsletter email sign up system to a new system. I had to create the new system to securely post the user data via API to the newsletter system, and move over all old contacts to the new newsletter system, keeping in mind what data needed to be kept and stored.