Biography
Daniel Groves is a 6th form student at Writhlington School. He designs and builds websites in his spare time, developing new skills and his website, Inspired By Wordpress. Daniel started Inspired By Wordpress as an excuse to share his knowledge of the Wordpress content management system which he has been using and developing themes for since 2007.
In the Beginning
I first got into web design at the age of 11. I was asked to join a web-design club by my ICT teacher, which I attended until he left. He taught me how to use Dreamweaver to create table-based layouts using the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get).
After some time all of the five member began work on our projects, I was creating a website for the Writhlington Orchid Project. Without knowing I later found out that theft already had one, but it has not been updated for a long time and so I began work on updating the website which was based on a platform which was new to me at the time, Mambo.
I quickly picked up Mambo, and began to manage a small team who would work on the website for an hour every tuesday after-school, and soon afterwards began to customise it with plugins, developing the capabilities of the website.
After some time the teacher who had been helping me do all of this left the school, leaving me to run the website as the other moved on deciding not to continue work on the project. I also continued to work on the skills I had learnt in the roots of the club, working in Dreamweaver based in a book that I had been left with "Dreamweaver MX Right from the Start". Eventually in 2006 I was asked to join Cockroach, a Young Enterprise company at the time.
My time with Cockroach
In Cockroach I was given the role of IT Director, to me this was the perfect role as it would allow me to use the skills I had developed over such a long period of time. I quickly took the Cockroach website through several version of the website, winning the Systemagic "Best use of IT" award at the bath area competition. Through out my time in the company I was working closely with a school IT technician who was helping me by showing me how to do new things I hadn't done before.
In January 2006 the technician I had been working with finally persuaded me to move on from Dreamweaver and the table-based layouts I has been using for all this time. He persuaded me to buy "Build your own website the right way using HTML and CSS" by Ian Lloyd.
I quickly worked through this 417 page book in just two weeks, working around school work at any possible opportunity. When I finished this book I created a new website for Cockroach, won further awards at later Young Enterprise competitions.
I stayed with Cockroach until it liquidated in March 2009.
Erixx
Although Cockroach had now broken up, I had been asked to join Erixx which it a web design and development, also a enterprise company at school.
I worked for Erixx until June 2008 when I was promoted, to the "Guy in Charge". I would say that I was company owner at this stage, except it was never registered in my name - I just ran the company then. I still run the company now, managing the 9 others that are employed by the company. I now act as the main designer and build some basic web application for the companies clients as I aim to develop my PHP, jQuery and CSS skills further yet.
The Future
I now have another year of 6th form ahead of me, in which time I plan to continue working with Erixx, aiming to attend Plymouth university to do a course in web application design. Along the side, I plan to do some freelance work potentially starting my own business in the future.