About

Mike sitting in front of a Will Barras' Mexico? painting.

My name is Mike Stenhouse and donotremove is my little corner of the interweb.

As a freelance web developer and designer I specialise in CSS, Accessibility and User Experience. I've been doing the rounds in London and have had the opportunity to work for or with clients including Virgin, the BBC, the GLA, PriceWaterhouse Coopers, BusinessLink and Red Bull.

When I first started writing my weblog it was mainly intended as a repository for links that I could access and post to from home or work... As time's gone on I've become more and more interested in online behaviour and culture. These days delicious handles my bookmarks and this site now hosts longer articles.

In 2005 I started Content with Style with a couple of friends, an online magazine focussed on front end web development.

Q & A

  1. What's this all about then?

    This site is my portfolio with the obligatory weblog and later I added my photos too. These days the photos have moved over to Flickr but the rest is still here. I don't blog as often as I should but that's because I'm generally too busy.

  2. So web standards then?

    I try to practice what I preach so this site is written in XHTML with CSS for style and DOM scripting for extra little niceties.

  3. What's running the back end?

    I chose to use Symphony to handle my site infrastructure.

    This site ran on a database editor I wrote back in 2001 - think phpMyAdmin for Access and SQL Server, until quite recently. It was fine at the time but it aged badly and I soon outgrew it but time wouldn't allow me to rewrite it in PHP or Ruby and it was becomming unmaintainable as I moved away from ASP...

    I tried Wordpress, Textpattern and Expression Engine out but none of them 'thought' the way I believe a CMS should. I was beginning to think that I would have to put time aside and roll my own. But when Symphony was announced way back in April 2005 I wandered over to investigate. It's a beautiful XSL based system that forces the output code to be well formed and valid - perfect.

  4. What do I write about?

    Originally it was just a place to dump my links that I could access from work and home. As time's gone on I've started writing more and more in my posts. My early posts are almost all about web standards and accessibility because that's what I was specialising in at the time. These days I'm facinated by how people use the internet so I've broadened my scope to include online behaviour and emerging internet trends.