Track record

King's College, Cambridge — rebuilding a ten-year-old website without losing its audience

King's College's website had grown for a decade without a structural rethink. Content was everywhere, the design predated smartphones, and the College intranet was a separate site with its own hosting bill. On top of that, once a year the site takes a beating: the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols draws tens of thousands of concurrent visitors from around the world, all at once, all on Christmas Eve.

Over 18 months I reviewed and re-indexed every page, reorganised the content using analytics data on how people actually moved through the site, and built a new edit-in-place editorial interface so staff could design rich pages without third-party tools. The intranet was folded into the main site, killing a whole separate system. The new theme was mobile-first, and Apache was tuned specifically for the Christmas Eve spike.

The site survived its first Festival without drama, the editorial team stopped needing a developer for everyday changes, and the College stopped paying to run two websites.

MTR — Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 for platforms that couldn't stop trading

MTR runs trade-in and recycling platforms for phones and personal electronics, including campaigns for Samsung. The platforms were on Drupal 7, processed thousands of transactions a day during promotions, and handled the kind of data that has to be encrypted, processed on-site behind a firewall, and wrapped in fraud prevention. "Take the site down for a few weeks while we rebuild" was not on the menu.

I rebuilt the Drupal 7 platforms in Drupal 10 — theme, data structures, and the backend API integration with the central system that pushed device models and pricing out to each platform and pulled transaction data back in. I also carried a set of sites up through the Drupal 8 → 9 → 10 chain, and built a new module suite for the phone repair workflow, from video-recorded parcel unpacking through to parts ordering and reporting.

The platforms kept trading throughout, including through Samsung promotional campaigns at full volume.

A Cambridge St John's College School — the upgrade everyone had been putting off

A well-known Cambridge school had a Drupal estate that had been quietly falling behind for years: Drupal 8 and 9 sites, a long tail of third-party modules, and a CiviCRM database north of 10 GB sitting underneath everything. Every year the upgrade got harder, so every year it got postponed — the classic trap.

I planned and delivered the upgrades to Drupal 10, working through the module compatibility problems one by one and keeping the school's non-technical staff informed in plain English at every stage — what I was doing, why, and what it meant for them. Alongside it I built a parent relationship system with personalised newsletters, SMS integration via Twilio, granular privacy controls, and React apps running inside Drupal pages, so the editorial team kept the tools they knew while parents got a modern, fast interface.

The estate came out current, supported, and — for the first time in years — boring to maintain. Which is the goal.