SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO LET GO TO HOLD ON
If you're like my current customers you are a professional person, already successful or at a point in your career where you realise you need to make some changes to your IT processes. Perhaps you work with clients yourself and see a need to provide them with expertise that you don't feel you quite have yourself? Many of my customers are case managers, solicitors and therapists who have brain injured clients in need of technology to help them recover or just to improve quality of life. They also have teams of professionals who need to work in a coordinated way and may simply need a shared calendar. Many more of my customers run a business and were overwhelmed by the pressures of GDPR (there, I said the word!), the risk of gadget failure, and the need to streamline the way their many unconnected processes seem to work against each other. Yet others have just taken the very important tentative steps of venturing out into the private business world and needed a modern website and a professional email service. The thing that they all share is the realisation that you can't do everything yourself! You can't learn, yourself, everything you need to know to buy a domain name and set up a web hosting account, or learn how to code a website. If you, or your client, needs a new laptop, you're unlikely to teach yourself all about processor technology and Operating System advantages so that you could go into Currys PC World and be confident enough to buy the right laptop from the fifty different models on the shelf. They all share the belief that they need to offload these responsibilities to a professional who they can trust to act in their best interests.
QUALIFICATIONS AND MEMBERSHIPS
- I have a BSc honours degree in Information Technology and Computing
- I am a Registered IT Technician (RITTech)
- I am a professional member of BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT
- I am a member of BATA, the British Assistive Technology Association
- I have a clear DBS certificate for both the adult and child workforce.
HOW I GOT HERE
My whole life has been dominated by a keen interest in technology.
I got my first computer, a Commodore VIC20, in about 1980 when I was 14 and that set me on the computing path. I remember my Sinclair Z80 owning science teacher being jealous of it! When I left school at 16 I became an apprentice for British Telecom in Leeds and later specialised in the digitisation of telephone circuitry. After seven years I decided to leave BT and joined the police instead. I served a thirty year career in South Yorkshire, mainly in roads policing. Being a "traffic cop" for more than twenty years gave me a solid understanding of the devastation that comes from serious injury and death on the roads. I became a senior serious collision investigator but also enjoyed many special events as a police motorcyclist such as escorting the Queen and other royals, meeting pop stars, various cycle races and the Olympic Torch Relay.
In 2003 my wife (who is an academic) bet me that I couldn't get a degree and that was enough to spur me on! I signed up to the Open University and spent the next four years slogging away at an honours degree in Information Technology and Computing. I graduated in 2007 with an upper second class honours degree and was very proud. A few years later, she bet me I wouldn't start my own IT company, so here I am! I set up Web & IT Studio in 2014 with the intention of having it running when I retired from the police and started out doing web services like new web sites and hosting etc. Over the years I have branched into Assistive Technology after being asked early on to help someone with a brain injury who was moving into an assisted living setting and needed broadband, a laptop, smart TV etc. and that side of my business took off from there.
A chance meeting with an old colleague in 2016, who was exploring the idea of starting a cyber security business but was missing a technology expert, led us to jointly set up Cyber Spider LTD and I am a director of that company which is all about digital safeguarding for the vulnerable.
I enjoy nothing better than hearing someone exclaim, "Wow, I didn't know I could do that!", after configuring some new gadget or other.
In my spare time, my passions are motorcycling, music and piano playing, and exploring historic buildings.
CONTACT ME TO DISCUSS YOUR PROJECT
A quick initial chat costs nothing and sets your mind at ease whilst giving me an idea of what you need.
