This is my personal website. It is to showcase my work in website design and development and stained glass art. It is also a test bed for any developments that I may be making to the websites of my clients, so it may not always look its best. I have completely upgraded this website using RapidWeaver and Foundation 6 with Stacks 4.

I started website design in 1995 in the very early days of the world wide web and have developed many websites, intranets and extranets since then. I started my career in 1980 as a Lithographic Offset printer and attended the Design for Print course in Bolton Street. I was also very lucky to have a great mentor in my early career who instilled in me a love for print design and typography. In 1985 I got to work with my first Apple Mac and this transformed design techniques with the likes of programmes such as Pagemaker and QuarkXPress. Remember them?

It was in the early 1990's that I first heard of something called the internet. Though it had been around for some time, it was through a university that I had my first experience of it using Telnet to remotely connect to the library in Trinity College, Dublin, to request research books for the government agency that I worked for. It was then that I was introduced to the world wide web and HTML coding. Though I was always interested in coding, I found myself actually enjoying coding HTML and from there, my love for web design was born.

Over the years I have moved from printer to researcher/data analyst to Oracle and Sharepoint developer but have always kept my interest in design. Web development has been with me since the 1990's and I continue with it today. Though I worked in Windows environments I have always been an Apple Mac nerd. Nothing can shake me from this. I guess it is because Apple have put a lot of thought into the design of their Operating Systems to give the user the best possible experience. This has influenced me a lot over the years. I believe they also bring out the creativity of those who use their systems. Take a look at Kai's Power Tools, a set of Photoshop plugins back in the 1990's. Though these are no longer available, the interfaces that Kai Krause created stand out, as they were not just functional, they were also incredibly beautiful. Styles and tastes change from year to year and these tools may look a bit outdated but I have fond memories of these applications.

My other love is stained glass art. I had never explored this interest but decided to do something about it a number of years ago. I have attended the National College of Art and Design since 2014 to learn the different techniques in glass art. I have created a number of leaded windows and also lamps and panels using the copper foil method made famous by Louis Comfort Tiffany in the late 19th century. Both methods use the same techniques to cut glass but differ in how the glass is held together. Leaded windows use lead came which are long strips of extruded lead with channels to hold the glass in place. Solder is applied to the points that the lead came join. This method is used in windows throughout the world particularly in churches. With the copper foil method, the edge of each cut piece of glass is covered with a thin strip of copper that sticks to the glass. Then each piece is soldered along the copper seam, joining it to the next piece. The advantage of this method is that it can be used to create 3 dimensional pieces, for example, lamps, boxes and all kinds of artistic pieces.