Howdy!

I’m Josh, a 19 year old web-developer currently living in Perth, Western Australia. I’m not a very complicated guy; I like to keep an open mind, I’m dig a lot of cool stuff, and I spend a lot of time doing stuff I like.

What stuff do I like, I hear you ask (even if you didn’t) - well, for starters, I’m well into graphic design. I have been for a big chunk of my life. When I was a kid, I used to draw all the time - all over the place, and eventually I decided I wanted to do the same thing on a computer. By about 1999 our family got our first beasty PC - one that could run graphics programs and peruse websites. Towards the end of my school-life, I was rocking out daily in Macromedia Fireworks and Dreamweaver (now under Adobe’s tyranic rule). To this day, I still use Fireworks and Dreamweaver to create sweet-ass websites using Automattic’s Wordpress content management system, along with some home-grown PHP and MySQL, and the standard mix of tasty HTML and CSS.

My love for designing graphics spans a little further than just websites, however; I occasionally crank out the odd logo or rad comic character, make custom type-faces, and concoct nifty patterns for backgrounds and desktop wallpapers.

I also love making music on bass guitar. I currently have a cheapo Ashton that came with its own 20w amp. Lots of music-y people tell me I should get a serious guitar, but to them I say it’s not the equipment, it’s what you do with it. I’m very fond of my cheapo Ashton, and especially like making jazzy tunes with it.

What I love more then laying tunes, though, is listening to tunes. I used to really dig Jazz, but not enough to call myself an aficionado; I’ve still got a couple of Jaco Pastorius records, and one of Weather Report - but that’s about it… Now-a-days I rock out to loads of Punk-rock, Ska and Hardcore. When it comes to listening to tracks, you’ll usually find that I have my speakers churning every hour I’m awake - I even listen to my iPod walking between my flat and my car… So yeah, I’m pretty serious about music.

I’m pretty serious about what I watch, too. I like a lot of spacey English comedy, comic book movies, zombie flicks, and anything that’s a little surreal. When my playlist isn’t oozing gnarly punk tunes, it’s usually stuffed with TV episodes or awesome movie line-ups for a rainy day in…

• Some of my favourite bands of all time include Rancid, Bombshell Rocks, Against Me!, Comeback Kid, From First to Last, The Dropkick Murphys, and more recently The Briggs, Lucky Number Seven, Street Dogs, The Critics, Have Heart and Give Up the Ghost.
• Some of my favourite movies of all time would be Clockwork Orange, Fight Club, Clerks, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Trainspotting, Breakfast Club and more recently Juno.
• Some of my favourite TV shows are Peep Show, The Mighty Boosh, Weeds, Nathan Barley, Burn Notice, Life, Firefly, Top Gear, Dexter, Spaced, Entourage, Black Books, Penn & Teller.

Making crunky web-cribs

Haggard Design is my seldom used business of web-fabrication. This website is here for me and the odd guest to blab about what’s happening in the world on a terribly occasional basis, and to showcase some of the stuff I’ve done with my time. I’m usually cranking away at code professionally - so the logos and websites here are mostly just stuff I make for fun, or friends & family.

I’m usually the first to admit I’m a bit of a code monkey - I started making websites in 2002, using little more then Notepad and MS Paint. After upgrading to Dreameaver and Fireworks, I decided that web-development is something I want to do for the rest of my life, so I took some college courses, worked my way through a couple of junior dev jobs (cranking HTML and CSS 8 hours a day), then tried my hand at some freelancing. After a while I’ve built up a pretty nifty skill set, including Yoda-like skills in Fireworks, and a fairly extensive knowledge of Wordpress (to the point of coding my own plugins and widgets). I’ve got a pretty mean grip on PHP & MySQL, and spin HTML and CSS like a silkworm.

While I love creating things that looks pretty in Fireworks, I love doing the same using code, which is why I don’t mind coding jobs all that much (though they can get frustrating).

About my site

Under the hood, this website is powered by Automattic’s awesome CMS, Wordpress, which runs on PHP and MYSQL, and can totally do pretty much anything. There’s also a bit of custom PHP involved to include certain functions that are usually done with clunky plug-ins, and it’s all covered in a crusty layer of super-valid XHTML Strict and CSS 2.1+ making it all look pretty.

When it came to finding somewhere for all this stuff to live, I couldn’t go past the award-winning hosting packages offered up by Jumba.