About Tom Hermans
Hi, I’m Tom, I’m a enthusiast web-designer/developer designing and building websites and web applications, with or without WordPress.
Speaking regularly at WordCamps or WordPress meetups
One of the regular speakers at WordCampNL in the Netherlands,
co-organizing and speaking at WordCamp Belgium and WordPress Meetup Antwerp
and attending (sometimes speaking at) much more web-related (mostly frontend or WordPress-related) conferences.
Me and what I do, past and present
As you might have noticed on the homepage, my skillset and expertise is rather broad.
Reason for this is, I’ve been around some time, and in various roles at different types of companies, be it a graphic designer/brand developer in an ad agency, full webdeveloper (both front- and backend) for a publisher or as a UX-designer/front-end coder in a big organisation or the freelance designer/coder in a limited-time project.
The fact that I’ve also been freelancing for quite some time now, gave me lots of insights in how organisations work and how people use websites.
For the last few years I’ve been combining being a freelance web designer/developer for various projects and clients, together with a position at Sony in their UX team, responsible for design and development of product campaigns and also occupied with the transformation to the new e-commerce platform, making it better, nicer and fit for mobile.
You can contact me for freelance assignments, ranging from webdesign and webdevelopment, WordPress consultancy to multimedia or print production. I’m a true chameleon and know my way around lots of stuff.
Lately I’ve been doing a lot of webdesign & development with WordPress, PodsCMS, custom PHP and HTML5 / CSS3 / jQuery, but also helping my clients think about their communication, content, target demographic and ultimately conversion.
Methodology and workflow
A few methodologies I believe in are responsive web design, mobile first and progressive enhancement.
I think it is also best to consider a browser environment as early as possible in a project, do the wireframing and prototyping in a browser and use style tiles and moodboards to convey the overall look that’s gonna be applied. And use an agile approach in refining these prototypes, module by module and consequently page by page.
Rather than starting from fixed-width Photoshop design comps to be transferred into HTML and hooked up to a CMS like WordPress, Drupal or others.
It’s easier to make site-wide amends, to think more holistic, to work with modules which inherit certain style elements from each other etc.
Stuff that’s harder to do with multiple PSD documents.
That doesn’t mean I think it’s not doable, or completly ‘wrong’ or something, and that I don’t do the occasional front-end and WordPress consultancy for already-made designs, but I try to advocate this approach whenever possible, cause in the end it works handier and can yield better results.