Trophy Designer and Software Engineer
Hi, I’m Paul Maden, a slate and stone trophy designer and computer programmer from Lancashire. I’m kind of unique!
I am responsible for the design and manufacturing of handmade stone and slate trophies for the family business.
Drawing inspiration from my Dad’s original Westmorland Green Slate trophies and plaques, I am currently expanding the range with new materials and designs and developing new processes including sandblasting, laser engraving and sublimation printing.
The work is difficult yet immensely rewarding, knowing our products (be they trophies, memorial plaques or miniature slate dogs jumping sandstone walls) will take pride of place on many a mantelpiece, wall or display cabinet.
Please visit Maden Britain or Green Slate Trophies to view samples of my work.
My CV will tell you that I have considerable experience in working with PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and have been responsible for the design, development, and maintenance of a large and diverse range of websites over twenty four years. It may also provide hints as to my particularly strong interest in Web Performance Optimisation, Conversion Rate Optimisation and on-page SEO.
Develop and maintain websites promoting the shop.
Create WordPress plug-ins to customise WooCommerce shopping cart and integrate with suppliers stock systems.
Developed WordPress sites for high profile Hotel, Restaurant and Retail customers.
Created WordPress plug-ins to enable integration with various Oracle Hospitality (née Micros) products.
Held the post of senior developer at a prominent accommodation directory site receiving 300,000+ visitors per week during the summer months.
My own performance targets were 0.1 seconds time to first byte, 1.0 seconds to content loaded. Despite the lack of a CDN, I succeeded around half the time.
Designed, created and supported a system for integrating and delivering low-bandwidth interactive flash video components into customer websites. Produced a portfolio site, user installation guides and over 50 paid customer projects.
Designed and built a database-free shopping cart system from scratch, and operated an online shop. It was lightning fast, easy to use, and brought in the money.
Additionally I built and maintained a variety of sites, large and small.
Within these roles I have come to appreciate the importance of a well designed, quick loading website, and of the need for it to be scalable in times of high demand. There is nothing worse than losing a sales opportunity due to a poorly designed or inadequately performing website!
You’ll find examples of my work (past and present) on the menu bar at the very top of this page. Please bear in mind that many ‘museum’ sites date back as far as the year 2000, and my work at Oracle and iKnow is (and only ever will be) only partially in the archive.
While work is important to me, and I do spend considerable time researching new tools, technologies and best practices, there comes a time when I do actually put down the power tools and switch off the computer!
I am what could best be termed as a “tryer” at ten pin bowling. My eleven years of playing in local leagues has yielded little one brief glimmer of success, regular bruises and joint pains, ample vocalised profanities, but lots of fun.
In more passive sporting terms I follow Burnley FC and Blackburn Hawks (Ice Hockey) and have an interest in Baseball and many forms of Motorsports (and not just Formula 1).
I (along with my girlfriend wife Sam) have an interest in fishkeeping, and we keep two small planted tanks stocked with Guppies, Danios, Ottos, Corys, Harlequins and other Rasboras.
In the past couple of years I have developed an interest in gardening, landscaping and D.I.Y., as a great way to a) unwind from work, and b) avoid actual housework.
Despite all this, I am a computer programmer, and as such it would be a bare faced lie to deny my DVD collection is heavily skewed towards Sci-Fi!
To contact me for any reason, please email me at paulmaden dot com.
I am interested to hear of new opportunities for trophy designs or website consulting.
Thanks for reading,
Paul