Projects & Portfolio

The Wales Yearbook Online

wyo

In 2014 FBA PR Agency (now FourCymru) contacted me to consult on their latest project: to take their annually published Wales Yearbook and turn it into a web directory.

They had not had success with previous efforts, so a tight deadline was set with great expectations.

I was quickly developed a prototype, linking together elected officials, civil servants, public figures, organizations and political parties.

Tech Stack:
* A custom Laravel4.1 app with MySQL
* Served by Nginx running on CentOS
* Git version control, deployments pulled from a Github private repo

I now maintain the Wales Yearbook Online and actively roll out new features.

Here’s what they had to say…

Mei Gwilym has worked with Four Cymru (formerly FBA) for a number of years on its flagship Wales Yearbook Online, which for the past quarter of a century has acted as the foremost and most authoritative guide to Welsh public life.

Having made the decision to change the Yearbook’s format and migrate its extensive data from hard copy to online, the project endured a succession of challenges which resulted in us having to take stock and return to the drawing board.

Following our appointment of Mei, his effective and efficient work saw us make more progress in the first few months than what we had done with our previous IT consultants in almost two years.

Within six months, the Yearbook Online was launched with its very own custom built content management system and extensive databases (which runs to tens of thousands of records), and is currently used by a host of Wales’s leading organisations, including Welsh Government, National Library of Wales and News International.

We are extremely happy with our ongoing relationship with him and could not recommend him more.

Four Cymru

See www.walesyearbook.co.uk and hire me!

Kerfoots of Porthmadog

New management brought about a strong new direction for this popular independent department store in Porthmadog.

I updated the Magento installation, set up a new structure for the catalogue and created landing pages for brands, departments and store features.

I also provided training for the day to day running of the online store so that Kerfoots staff can keep it fresh and updated.

  • Update Magento Install
  • Install and heavily customize the theme
  • New payment gateway, page and block creation
  • Integrate with Analytics, Adwords and Google Merchant

See kerfoots.com and hire me!

Ysgol y Gelli

gelli

Ysgol y Gelli primary school in Caernarfon needed a better way to communicate with parents and other stakeholders.

I created a flexible WordPress site, publishing in both Welsh and English.

The new site gives them the ability to publish news and images, pages of statutory information and a calendar for upcoming events.

I trained the staff in it’s use and they’re thrilled with the site, and the easy way in which its kept updated.

  • WordPress installation
  • Plugins for security, performance and usibility
  • Customize the theme

See www.ysgolygelli.org and hire me!

DymaFi

dymafi

In 2013 local television company Cwmni Da asked me to help with their new multiplatform film commissioned for S4C.

DymaFi (Welsh for This is Me) was an ambitious project to show a slice of the life of Wales’s young people. They searched for participants to film themselves on the longest day of the year, in order to create a film shown in the Autumn of 2013.

With their online team, I built a site to capture videos uploaded by youngsters. These videos were passed to Vimeo for hosting and then presented on a map of Wales using their locations.

I used Symfony2, which handled the load well. There were no problems with uploading and all submissions were stored safely. Cwmni Da were then able to moderate and edit all submissions in their own back end CMS before publishing.

  • Symfony2 app with MySQL
  • Admins can moderate content
  • Deployed from Github repo

The site has now slightly changed in use but is still available, see dymafi.tv and hire me!

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