About us

My name is Phil Houghton. I'm passionate about good design and I'm here to spread as much of it around as I can!

We advocate accessibility standards

I'm a member of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers and like nothing more than to show people that good, accessible design need not be dull design, indeed when we take the principles of design to include the ergonomic flow of a site then accessible design is necessarily good design. Even if we take design in the shallowest sense, of making a site look good, there is little we can't do in a fully accessible website that we could do in a site conceived without regard to accessibility.

We advocate web standards

I'm also a member of the Web Standards Group. I've been on the internet since 1993 when a two inch square picture of Winona Ryder was the most exciting thing that happened in cyberspace and even that would take five minutes to appear. I've also seen the "browser wars" of the late 90's where diverging and proprietary standards caused chaos - and mountains of work for designers. Thankfully the wars are now over and browsers are more or less compliant with the standards laid down by the World Wide Web Consortium. The benefits of these standards are clear and proven - cheaper development, cheaper hosting, cheaper maintenance, far greater inter-operability, improved search ranking, better quality assurance - but while the browsers are now "on board", many designers are still lagging behind. As a strong advocate and practitioner of standards-based web design, this upsets me. The money their clients have spent getting ill-fitting, expensive to maintain, low ranking websites made could have been spent with me on a beautiful, low cost, high ranking, well designed, well engineered site!

Really about us

That was rather about the organisations I'm affiliated to and why. Here's about me for real.

I used to be a senior programmer on a mission critical application for one of the world's biggest banks. That's where I learned how to code and, more importantly, how to analyse, organise and test. After several years I'd had enough of helping the corporation make 11-figure profits so I sold up and - after an attempt to write my great unfinished novel - I tuned up the HTML and PHP skills I'd been using on various projects until I was satisfied I was ready to meet my public. I launched Dreamberry in early 2008.

I'm the son of an accomplished engineer and a renowned glass artist and I think I've inherited a little from each of them, which helps when engaging in a discipline which is somewhere between the two. I like to think I've got the balance right. See for yourself by taking a look at my portfolio.

Outside of my professional life, I play football and occasionally watch football. I like walking and I like to travel. I cook a lot, which is just as well as I also eat a lot, my favourite being Mexican, although it's difficult to get good Mexican in Teesside. The biggest thing in my life is probably music. I play guitar and piano and have an embarrassingly large record collection which is on constant rotation.

And that's me. Now, let's hear about you!

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