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Digital recruitment agency Become helped George Clark find his new role as web

developer at Selfridges. George gives Figaro Digital a guided tour of his world

Movers & Shakers

What does your new role at

Selfridges involve and what do

you hope to achieve?

It involves taking artwork andmock-ups from the designers andbuilding out standards-compliantHTML and CSS web pages, whilstwrestling with the intricacies of thecontent management system thatSelfridges has in place. Which, shallwe say, is interesting! The system isbuilt on IBM webshpere e-commercerunning the Accelerator CMS on topof that. If just actually explainingthe system is complicated, trygrappling with it on a daily basis!Counter-intuitive would be anunderstatement, but hey, we make itwork in the end! I’m always lookingto refine my code and learn more.Experimenting with CSS3 andjquery to improve user experience isa top priority for me.

What qualities make for a

successful web developer?

You’ve got to enjoy bringing projectsto life. I still get a kick out ofbuilding a page that will rendercorrectly across browsers and will be seen by thousands of people.Attention to detail and problemsolving are also qualities that anydeveloper will need. Sending outpages to be QAd by the departmentwill often result in tweaks, sopatience and an easygoing attitude help.

What site or app could you not

live without?

This may sound silly but, here goes -the interweb! Tahdah! As a developerthere is just so much out there onthe web to inspire and help youwhen coding. The developercommunity is just so open and

welcoming, you can always find theanswer or piece of advice you needto help with that thorny IE6 floatissue. Seriously though, I couldn’t be without Firebug and the webdeveloper toolbar for Firefox. Safariand Chrome have versions ofdebugging plug-ins, but I like the simplicity of Firebug, and the functionality of web developertoolbar.

What was your first job in the

digital industry and how have

things changed since then?

I got into digital in the late 1990sbut then had a long period of doingother things, like running awatersports business in Spain. Backthen the dotcom boom washappening so I guess I missed out!Now though, I’m loving getting backinto digital. Things have got to apoint where print design and digitaldesign have merged, and there’s noexcuse for having an ‘old school’ stylewebsite with formulaic navigation,menus and unformatted text or poortypography. Websites and web appsare now rich with interaction andfunctionality and very often beautifulto look at. It’s a great time to beinvolved in web development as itfeels like we’re moving on to a betterplace visually and functionally.

Who would you invite to your

fantasy dinner party and why?

It’s gotta be Sean Locke, he is justhilarious and a good dinner partyneeds laughter. I don’t think I’dinvite anyone from the digital sphereas we’d bore the socks off everyoneelse talking about web fonts, APIs orjquery and manipulating the DOM!Come on, dinner parties aresupposed to be fun!

What do you think is the most

significant issue facing web

developers using social media?

I have to hold my hands up and say, Ihaven’t had the pleasure of gettinginto mobile development yet. I thinkresponsive web design is going to be amassive issue for creative developerstoday. It’s relatively straightforwardin setting up your CSS media queriesfor different viewport widths andwhatnot, but the added time neededto test for all of this is HUGE. Withmore and more users viewing webcontent on mobile devices andtablets, this is an area we can’t affordto ignore and are going to have toevolve speedier ways of prototypingfor all these different devices.

What do you think will be the

most significant innovation in

web development 2012?

I think the imminent death of Flash,and the rise of applications likeAdobe Edge, to basically do the samejob, but serve up animations orcontent incorporating HTML5 andthe canvas element, will be big in2012. Although Edge currently spitsout a lot of rather heavy Javascript atthe moment, I’m sure this willimprove, and providing rich userinterface designs with beautifulmultimedia content from video tosimple transitions, with fasterdevelopment time and supportedacross all devices will be technologyimpossible to ignore in 2012. ■

George Clark Web developerSelfridges

www.becomeuk.com

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