Colin Howells
Web developer and designer living in Seattle
- CI/CD
- PHP
- AWS
Tenacious learner with 12 years of all-round web-development and engineering experience – creating branding, architecting back-end services, optimizing front-end performance, and improving user experiences.
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Track Record
Career7
Built a number of JavaScript-driven trivia games with an audience of tens of thousands using my proposed stack of SvelteKit hosted on Cloudflare as Workers, modeling and authoring content in headless CMSes, queried and mutated via GraphQL and REST. In addition to being technically much simpler than our typical architecture, it was much cheaper to host and run. Assisted in building a network-wide paid loyalty program using SvelteKit, TypeScript, Stripe, and Cloudflare Workers, which involved chronologically-delimited actions per user, multiple membership tiers with different features offered, and product purchases from accumulated point redemptions. Created internal dashboards for editing content and surfacing actionable insights. Worked on Shopify themes, involving web components.
Expanded and improved a WordPress publishing network, handling the integrations, optimizations, and troubleshooting typical to enterprise-scale sites: SEO and structured markup, analytics (data modeling, custom events) and GTM, advertising (including header bidding), ecommerce integrations, custom APIs and middleware, machine-learning recommendation systems, hosting and caching, AWS (API Gateway, CloudFront, S3), as well as the repackaging of content for other platforms (ex. Facebook’s Instant Articles). Designed and built a number of applications enabling editors to create and schedule gamified conversion-funnel landing pages benefitting charities and nonprofits featuring videos and quizzes. Some of these were React-based, some Svelte.
Designed and developed a publishing network of more than 50 WordPress sites, some multisite, featuring custom-built themes, plugins, branding, and tables, with islands of React-driven interactivity. (Docker was used for local development, running Node for its asset build step, which leveraged Laravel Mix, and deployed via GitHub Actions.) Monetizing more than 75 million pageviews a month for the benefit of nonprofits and charities, reaching over 100 million Facebook fans, the network became a significant revenue stream and massively changed the business model.
Created and revised email marketing templates to improve deliverability and presentation. Created initial Facebook presence for the company, and assisted in many successful social-networking promotions. Analyzed and reported on clickthrough rates for email marketing of retail promotions. Studied best industry practices and competitors to keep up with the changing online retail environment and resolve deliverability issues.
Acted as traffic manager for design staff, assigning work and coordinating production of ecommerce online advertisements and product images. Responsible for conducting interviews of designers and making hiring decisions. Conducted annual performance reviews for department employees. Worked with product buyers and designers to develop and manufacture merchandise for sale.
Created printed packaging for products as well as advertisements and promotional materials. Made illustrations for use on apparel and supervised their production. Color-corrected and masked raw product photographs.
Created an all-digital PDF prepress workflow to replace a camera-ready process. Initiated and supervised a complete redesign of the company’s flagship publication, a 100+-page monthly magazine of 20,000 circulation. Designed covers and editorial content, print advertisements, brochures, logos, and coupons, under tight deadlines. Thoroughly revised the publisher’s Web presence for increased usability. Acted as network and database administrator for the company. Wrote feature articles and contributed to the editing of publications.
Education1
University of Michigan
Bachelor of Fine Arts, Graphic Design