Bio on Kes Phelps, Freelance Web Designer

In 1996 Kes Phelps asked himself what are his natural abilities were and what he enjoyed. He had always been creative with a passion for art and design, and also technically minded. The Internet boom had just exploded and so he made the decision to carve a career in Web Design.

At the time there were no Web Design higher level education courses in his home town of Norwich in the UK, to which he was committed due to family reasons. The most suitable and highest profile course was the Applied Computing degree at the University of East Anglia which, although was predominately a software engineering degree, did have some modules related to web design and the programming and database skills would stand him in good stead for developing web based applications.

Kes successfully completed the prerequisite Access Course in Engineering and Technology at the Norwich City College and was offered a place on his chosen degree which he went on to complete, with honours, in 2000.

His first position after graduation was at British Telecom working as a call centre operative. Then after six months, a secondment within BT Retail arose, building an Intranet site for a team of project managers. He put himself forward and his application was accepted.

This short term contract was invaluable in his personal and skill development. Here he taught himself ASP building a small scale, web based application. He was also given the opportunity to develop his project management skills gained at university.

From there he had a brief spell as a freelance web designer but due to lack of experience, struggled to make a comfortable living. It was clear he needed to get back into the workplace to gain more experience and after six months as a freelancer he managed to find work with mProvision, then known as mGenie.

mGenie was an internet marketing company owned by Fox Tucker. Fox was well known within the affiliate marketing arena and helped create the DGM affiliate marketing network.

This wasn’t just an excellent opportunity for Kes to hone his web design and development skills, but also to learn about the entrepreneurial aspects of online business from his mentor, Fox. After one year he was appointed Head of Technical Development, designing, developing and project managing internet solutions that delivered Mobile Phone Media. It was here that he became fascinated by his now specialist area of Internet development, search engine optimisation.

After three years at mProvision he went on to join WhichPoker.com, a highly successful online poker portal, as Head of Mobile Content. When the company realised his search engine optimisation expertise he became involved with their online marketing. After ten months however he was made redundant due to role change.

By this time, however, his skills and experience were sufficient to go into business as a freelance web designer, developer and SEO. This had always been a dream and something continuing very much in the background but now there was an opportunity to take it to another level. He redesigned and optimised his site, which you can get to via the link in the footnote of this article, and slowly watched it climb the search engine rankings.

As it climbed the enquires began to come and now Kes Phelps has a steady flow of work, specialising in designing, developing and optimising internet solutions for small and medium sized businesses.