About

For me the name "Plus 8" came about because I used to DJ quite a lot at the time and whenever I was mixing, like with most other stuff I tended to end up with everything turned up to full-speed, which on Technics decks at the time was +8%.

Please note I am not affiliated with legendary Ritchie Hawtin & John Acquaviva's excellent record label from Canada although they do make superb minimal techno so do check them out.

I have run a variety of my own websites, some commercial and some not, for many years now and have since October '07 run my own server which means I have been able to offer my clients secure, relatively luxurious hosting for their e-commerce websites as part of the overall package.

I'm a keen student of internet marketing and am a big believer in first hand research, followed by testing, testing and yet more testing. Test the ads, test the copy, survey the customers/visitors etc. I try to use the testing to get right inside the head of our ideal customer and optimise the entire sales process to their needs rather than what we think they want.

The hours I keep are ultimately project-led but I generally prefer to work at night when it's quiet. I communicate with my clients by sms, email and phone. If something needs to be finished I stay on it till it's done. So far I've work primarily in ASP and Javascript on Windows systems although that's more by chance than choice and in the last few months I've been heads down learning drupal, linux and even a spot of php, and as of the last month or so now working primarily on Drupal sites.



Thanks to steve for the relentless hounding to switch to linux+drupal. I'm actually a big fan of open standards and open-source software/principles, it just happens I learnt on windows machines so that's what's worked for me till now.

As things get more and more abstracted and xml-orientated I'm finding I've got the freedom to work more with other platforms and technologies, and worry less about writing code, and more about the project/sales workflow. It's still early days with Drupal but I'm regularly bowled over by what's possible right out of the box and with just a few modules.

Again I mostly use(d) ASP "classic" rather than .net, not because "anti-.net", but some of the stuff I'd built was pre-.net and there was no great need to re-write it. A sale's a sale, no matter what platform it was hosted on and I can build most rapidly in ASP so that's what I used.

Before .net if you wanted to improve the performance of asp-based pages you could optimise them and/or outsource some of the heavy lifting (e.g. encryption or some db tasks) by wrapping parts of the process up into a VB6 DLL to use as a server component. That still applies and works now so as such .net didn't really present any significant advantages to my production process.

Ultimately I'm more interested in what business objectives can be achieved by use of programming and Drupal, rather than which particular language revision or platform it's on. The code is just a tool, and like most tools, your results tend to be dictated more by who's wielding it rather than how shiny it is ;)