Information

Old Guard is the the online home of Tom Johnson. I use this site to talk about a range of subjects centered around the web – predominantly design, ecommerce, technology, usability, coding and productivity.

Profile

Bios always seem to be written in the third person, but since i’m writing this myself I won’t be doing that – that would be a bit odd! So…Hi! My name is Tom and I spend an awful lot of time thinking about usability, design, analytics, website conversion, and generally everything online.

My background is in design, having started my career creating work for both print and the web, as well as building websites. I built my first site on Geocities over 10 years ago and have been involved in creating websites ever since.

Currently my work combines modern usability practices, analytics information and user insight with traditional design theory to improve website experiences and conversion.

I am based in North-West England in the town of Knutsford, in Cheshire.

9-5

I work in-house for a large travel company as an Online Conversion Manager, where I am responsible for site conversion, lead design, usability, analytics, E-CRM and strategy. I am also involved in looking at the planning and direction of social media usage and mobile sites.

All of that means I am lucky enough to work on market leading enterprise-level e-commerce sites and use some fantastic tools like Tealeaf, Omniture SiteCatalyst and SDL Tridion on a daily basis.

Previously I have worked in agencies (both web and print lead) and for myself, freelancing full-time.

Contact

I will probably add a contact form to the site in the future, but at the moment the best way to get in touch with me is via Twitter.

You can also follow my shots on Dribbble, see what I ffffind and also subscribe to my RSS feed.

Colophon

This is Old Guard V.4. It is running on WordPress and uses the Google Font API for the headings and navigation, which are set in Arimo by Steve Matteson and Arvo by Anton Koovit.

The site also uses hashgrid (#grid) from Analog, which you can read about and download here. Or to try it out here just press g. I really recommend this for any sites you may be building.

I cover the site design, build, technology etc in much more depth, as well as some of the decisions I made whilst building in quite a bit of detail in the first and second articles on the site.