W3C

When I joined Studio24, I was given the opportunity to be the primary CMS developer on the W3C website following a recent redesign. From turbo-charging my accessibility knowledge to learning how to work in the open, this project was rewarding in so many ways.

There were so many highlights while working on this project, but my shortlist would be:

• Developing a custom CKEditor plugin to make table markup more accessible
• Working directly with the Craft team to make Craft as a CMS more accessible on the content editor side of the application.
• Working with and learning from the W3C team themselves.

HS2

During my time at Studio24, HS2 was one of the sites I became the most familiar with. Not only did it give me my biggest taste of how working on a public sector website goes, but it also gave me the opportunity to make a real difference with the code I was writing.

In Your Area Map

As alluded to above, the largest part of the HS2 website I worked on was their In Your Area Map which allowed users to see what works were currently being done where across the country.

This involved taking the existing version of the map, a Vue 2 instance that was reaching end-of-life, and redeveloping it completely in vanilla JavaScript.

Throughout my work on this project, I was careful to document every part I was working on, not only for my own benefit, but for the benefit of others that would work on the project alongside me.

The work involved creating the map instance in Leaflet, creating a filtering system for the types of work that were being carried out, querying WordPress for information about each of the works through the use of Custom Post Types and page categories, as well as querying the GiS API to accurately map out the location of each of the works on the leaflet map.

It was also important that the map was as accessible and intuitive as possible.

HMICFRS

We supported HMICFRS through a complex hosting migration, ensuring their teams could keep publishing reports while we moved the site behind the scenes to a faster, safer platform.

When we first took on the project, it was a tapestry of a site that had been continuously maintained for the past 10+ years, which meant there was a lot to sort through and document. One of the first things I did on this project was to go through the original codebase, figuring out how it worked, and noting the numerous plugins on the site, documenting it all as I went. This helped the team to be able to quickly onboard onto the project and get the migration going.

Once we'd wrapped our heads around the project, I started the migration of the codebase from their previous agency's gitlab instance to our GitHub organisation. The trick was that we needed to keep the commit history in-tact while doing so, so after a fair bit of research as to how to do this, I managed to get it done by creating a git patch of all of the previous commits, and apply that to the more barebones version of the repo that we had originally ported over.

The migration also involved taking the existing multisite instance of the site, and converting it into single-site instance, as well as consolidating and curating the plugins on the site to bring it up to speed to modern versions of WordPress.

You can read more about how the project went in the Case Study written by Studio24.

Cambridge Film Festival

Cambridge Film Festival was the first project I worked on as part of Studio24.

My work on this involved migrating the data from their older Drupal CMS setup to a fresh Craft build, for which I created the content model.

Then, once the site went live, it was largely my responsibility to keep it updated and handle the changes it would make when the site would go into "Festival Mode" during the festival.

Fitzwilliam Museum

The Fitz is one of my favourite projects I’ve ever worked on. My work on it started early into my role at Studio24, jumping into an obsolete build of Directus CMS hooked up to a Symfony frontend, doing support bits and pieces and getting familiar with the setup. At one point, they requested a redesign / redevelopment of some of their existing page templates, with a suite of newly designed components that it was my job to model the content of.

Their existing setup restricted them to being able to use components only once, and in a specific order. Hearing their frustrations with it, and the extra work it was costing them to get us to change something they would usually be able to change themselves lit a fire under me to find a way to modernise it for them. I achieved this in the form of a repeater field that allowed one instance of any given component to be added to it, where relational fields such as images and entry listings utilised the IDs assigned to these entries as configurable number fields for the client to be able to ‘select’ what existing entries they wanted to use in these components.

When we presented this work to the client, I received the bit of feedback that I keep going back to on a rainy day, and that was the pure unadulterated joy of their newfound ability to add a simple blockquote to their content at will!

Future Legacies

In 2023, the Fitzwilliam held the Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance exhibition to reflect on the museum’s connection to the transatlantic slave trade and to ask whose stories were being told through its art collection. The ‘Rise Up’ exhibition in 2025 was a follow-up to Black Atlantic and a continuation of the project.

To keep the stories of Black Atlantic and Rise Up alive, and with the aim of creating a fairer future for black artists, the museum created the Future Legacies website.

We originally took on this site from an instance of WP Engine it had been built in. Our designer worked his magic on the design and I was tasked with building it in WordPress.

Having recently taken the Complete CSS course by Piccalilli, my approach to this project was a little different than previous projects. I put together a FigJam, breaking down each of the components on the site, and getting all of my thoughts down as I went through the design. I found this approach immensely helpful, as someone with ADHD, I was able to just get down all of my thoughts on 'paper' and consolidate them in one place. It also meant I was able to more easily have a back-and-forth with the designer with any questions I had by giving him the link to the FigJam and giving him a glimpse into my brain.

This also helped with other parts of the project, with our in-house accessibility expert being able to highlight potential accessibility issues before the site was fully built, which made it easy for things like the video in the hero, and the toggle-able search component to be as accessible as possible from the get-go.