Mike Bull

"My online home for professional links, my CV and various other tidbits about me."

It heavily utilises the jQuery framework for controlled scrolling as the average visitor to this web page would likely require all the information in one visit.

"Free Legal Documents for Public and Business Use"

I was tasked by my employer with designing and developing a system for a large number of free legal documents for business and personal use. For a service section I decided to differ from the typical layout and build a more eye-catching landing page for users. After I designed and built the initial landing page the page was tailored to my employers needs.

The site was also coded mainly by me using C# on the Sitecore CMS.

"Law Resources for Students."

Over the Christmas period I was tasked with creating a new section for our flagship site for students looking for information on careers in law. A bespoke layout was created tailor the feel of the section towards its audience.

The design utilises a number of social aspects, namely integration with Facebook and a Twitter feed.

"Professional Will Drafting."

During my eight-week internship I was tasked with building a website for the Umbraco CMS. After a brief consultation a new design was built around the company's logo, and various templates were built to accomodate the wide range of services to be sold.

"The UK's leading free legal resource."

My employers flagship service is Law on the Web, the UK's leading free legal resource for the public. After a recent transition to the Sitecore CMS I work daily on maintaining the website and developing new legal projects within the CMS.

The site receives tens of thousands of visitors on a daily basis and has grown in size and stature over the past year.

"A fully-functional web application using the Google API."

In 2009 I landed a place on the Shell Step scheme and was offered an internship at SACO Apartments. One of the final tasks of my internship was to build an internal application to query major search engines and list key information on the companies placement within given search queries. Information was stored within a database and was used to compare results compared to previous weeks, and was built to be exported into various formats such as a HTML page or as a comma-delimited file for MS Excel.

Despite no prior experience I opted to use .NET. After three weeks of work a fully-functional web application was built using the Google API and JSON, SQL Server 2005 (built using stored procedures), jQuery and ASP.NET.

"A custom-built search engine to parse and rank pages on aesthetic traits."

After a successful internship at the end of my second year at university I opted again to use ASP.NET and C# for my final-year project, a custom-built web search engine, split into a crawler, parser, indexer, ranker and front-end ASP.NET page. The novelty of the search engine was to attempt to parse and rank web pages in terms of aesthetics and good design traits. As an example, a nicely designed page with a clean colour set and valid HTML would rank better than a poorly-designed and poorly-coded web page.

After several months of research and hours of coding my project was successful and I achieved a top mark for my work.