Craig Francis


Portfolio - Carlson Digital

From February 2004 to November 2005 I worked at the marketing agency, Carlson Digital, originally called BBM Carlson. I was originally employed as a PHP and HTML developer, but took on more responsibilities, such as server setup, during my employment.

Orange Regulatory Affairs

Descriptions are being added slowly, starting from the bottom...

Lurpak Breakfast

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Hyundai News

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Muller

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Muller Bridget Jones

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Muller Probiotics

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Cafe Met - Urban Fresh

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Shell Pluspoints

Shell wanted to re-fresh their PlusPoints micro site, which was being maintained by the Northampton office of Carlson.

This was one of the first chances we got to work with the developers in Northampton, who were all ASP based.

The end result was that we delivered a flat XHTML version of the website, with the new design, and they implemented it around their existing code base... apart from a couple of little communication problems, and a few trivial validation errors, the project went quite well.

Proximus

ProxiClub Promo, was for the Belgium company Proximus, who at the time, wanted to give their customers the opportunity to buy phones using their loyalty style points.

It was our job to create a website that allowed the customer to request one (or more) phones using their available loyalty point balance... it had to be a request, as we could not have direct access to the customer database, so it was possible that customers could spent their points in other ways on the same day.

In addition to the shopping cart functionality, the website was also provided in Dutch, French and English... fortunately, Beccy Jackson was able to load and check all of the content.

Guinness

Carlson Digital created the original Guinness website, but that was before my time. Fortunately, for me, they were so impressed that they chose us to do the site refresh.

On this project we worked with Accenture and 'their' CMS, which had error messages that showed striking similarity to MS Content Management Server 2003.

But, despite the CMS using IE's rendering engine, which created invalid mark-up, and their developers having difficulty identifying the <form> tags, the site has gone live and seems to be a success.

Huggies Convertibles

Huggies wanted a micro-site for their new Convertibles product, which needed to provide printable money off coupons - one per customer.

In this particular project, we outsourced the coupon printing functionality to Coupon Star, who provided a service which stopped a customer printing multiple copies of the coupon, using an ActiveX control.

Unfortunately this was easily defeated by a photocopier... oh well, the client was happy though.

Milupa

Milupa and Cow & Gate needed a micro-site each to allow people to apply for a free menu planner.

It was a fairly small project with Steve Avery providing the main page styles and content, and I simply added the functionality behind the forms.

NHS Bright Futures

The NHS Bright Futures website was mostly flat HTML pages providing resources for schools.

The main feature was the ability for the schools to login, and for the students to provide anonymous details about themselves. It would create graphs showing this data, like their weight, and how they compared to the national averages.

Plymouth DAAT

There were a few DAAT websites created by Carlson Digital, which were built around a fairly simple CMS, the first version of which was created by Nick Rogers.

And it was the Plymouth DAAT website was the first one I setup, meeting the new requirement that it must share the same server (and database) with another DAAT website.

Crown Sweden

Originally Carlson Digital created the main Crown Paints websites (UK), which was then duplicated for Finland and Sweden.

All three versions did get integrated into their CMS, however for a few months we did text, image and functionality amends for the Finland and Sweden versions.

This was one of my first experiences with creating a website in a different language.