Creative Designer at Trader Media Group
Liverpool, United Kingdom
- Current
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- Creative Designer at Trader Media Group
- SEO, Web Designer and Affiliate Marketing at bal4.co.uk
- Past
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- SEO Consultant / Web Designer at Position Gold Ltd
- SEO Executive at Latitude
- Company Director at Darker Limited
- Senior Web Designer at Connect Internet Solutions
- Education
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- St Helens College
- Connections
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39
connections
- Industry
- Internet
- Websites
Steven Balfour’s Summary
Website designer and developer with expertise in search engine optimisation, web accessibility and online ecommerce stores.
Steven Balfour’s Specialties:
SEO, PPC, X/HTML, PHP, CSS, Accessibility, JavaScript, Actioscript, MySQL, Photoshop, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Flash, QuarkXPress, Online Ecommerce
Steven Balfour’s Experience
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Creative Designer
Trader Media Group
(Privately Held; Publishing industry)
October 2008 — Present (10 months)
I joined Trader Media Group Limited as the Creative Designer within their Core Channel which focuses mainly on the online advert system and the design of the Auto Trader website's selling pages. I work as the sole designer within this channel and responsibilities include creating mock-up designs for new and redeveloped areas of the website, building pages (html, css, JavaScript, Flash, Actionscript etc.), developing systems within the online booking process and testing design layouts for advert booking pages. During this role I have learnt to work within a Java (JSP) environment and have increasingly been involved with writing JavaScript due to the nature of the Auto Trader website and in-house developed widgets.
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SEO, Web Designer and Affiliate Marketing
bal4.co.uk
(Internet industry)
November 2005 — Present (3 years 9 months)
I am also currently working self employed as an Affiliate Marketer earning commissions from a group of product and service related websites that I have created. These websites cover multiple subject areas and have helped me learn a whole new set of skills for promoting websites.
Whilst working as an Affiliate Marketer I believe I have spotted a gap in the market and have created AffiliStore - a PHP/MySQL program that creates a price comparison affiliate website from multiple merchant datafeeds. AffiliStore is especially useful for beginner affiliates who may not have any knowledge of HTML, PHP or MySQL but wish to create datafeed driven websites. It also allows more experienced affiliates to quickly develop new websites, freeing up their time to concentrate on promoting the products. -
SEO Consultant / Web Designer
Position Gold Ltd
(Internet industry)
December 2007 — October 2008 (11 months)
I was employed at Position Gold Limited as a Search Engine Optimisation Consultant and Web Designer. My main role was to redevelop and promote their company website and gain top ten rankings for the competitive search terms “Search Engine Optimisation”, “Search Engine Optimization” and “SEO”. I achieved this goal within 5 months of working for the company and greatly increased the website's visitors and conversion rates. I also worked on designing, coding and promoting client websites.
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SEO Executive
Latitude
(Privately Held; Marketing and Advertising industry)
March 2007 — August 2007 (6 months)
Latitude Group is a world leading search marketing agency and have one of Europe's largest teams of search specialists. As a Search Engine Optimisation Executive I was working on a variety of websites in various sectors including car insurance, iva/debt consolidation, loans, electrical products and recruitment websites.
During my time at Latitude Group I managed and developed several SEO campaigns and helped websites increase their natural rankings in the major search engines which in turn increased visitors, leads and sales/conversions. As I had previous experience as a web designer I also helped redevelop/design client websites so that they gained maximum benefit from the increased traffic generated by the positive search results. This includes advice on clearly displaying call to actions and highlighting unique selling points. -
Company Director
Darker Limited
(Consumer Goods industry)
November 2003 — March 2007 (3 years 5 months)
Darker Ltd. was a company created by myself and a business partner. The Glass Block Outlet (a subsidiary of Darker Ltd.) website was developed and built by myself and sells glass blocks and glass block related products online. We were the first glass blocks online store to calculate the materials required to build your glass blocks design. The online store was created using Actinic Catalog and integrated with a WorldPay merchant account. Although Actinic was a useful program, it still required me to develop my own JavaScript and PHP to create the glass block DIY installation pack systems.
Glass Block Outlet is number one in many search engines for related industry key phrases such as 'Glass Blocks', 'Glass Bricks', 'Glass Block' and 'Glass Brick'. This is due to the search engine optimisation I have implemented since the start of the project.
Glass Block Outlet is listed on the BBC website under Garden Invaders Top Ten Products. -
Senior Web Designer
Connect Internet Solutions
(Internet industry)
April 1997 — April 2006 (9 years 1 month)
Connect Internet Solutions established an unrivalled reputation for developing total business solutions for a wide range of private sector clients, from small to medium sized businesses to blue-chip companies.
As a Senior Designer my job was to lead the design projects of which I was allocated and develop websites from concept through to final design. This included client meetings, producing designs and artwork, development of HTML and uploading the websites to the live server.
Skills I have developed during this role include Accessibility, XHTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MYSQL, Flash and Actionscript. I have also worked with a variety of software including Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, Freehand, Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXPress, Word, Powerpoint and many more.
Some of the larger projects I worked on included Liverpool FC, Knowsley Council, University of Liverpool and Merseytravel.
Steven Balfour’s Education
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St Helens College
HND , Graphic Design , 1994 — 1996
Additional Information
Steven Balfour’s Websites:
Steven Balfour’s Groups:
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UK Digital Agency Network
Steven Balfour’s Contact Settings
Interested In:
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