About

Maura McDonnell is a freelance web designer based in Carlow, Ireland.

Skills

Maura is a web designer with 11 years experience in the web design and multimedia industry.  Her skills are in both design and code.  Maura is an expert in many internet and design technologies, such as Dreamweaver, Contribute, Photoshop, Fireworks, xHTML, CSS, video, audio, flash, blogs, youtube, wordpress and shopify.  She works with both static and dynamic websites, creating databases and customising php code for wordpress CMS and blog implementations.  She gained considerable multimedia skills working from 2000 to early 2002 as a multimedia developer with the leading e-learning publishing company – Intuition Publishing.

Strengths

One of the added value that you get when you employ Maura to build a website for you, is her artistic ability.  Maura can create a visually pleasing design for you, because she won’t let anything but the best be created for your website.  This is an added value, when you employ maura to work on your website, you are guaranteed a visually pleasing design.  As a result of this, Maura’s strength is her skill and focus on design – the graphic design of the look and feel of your website and her technical skill in providing a high quality web design.  If your website looks good – you build trust and credibility with your website visitors and potential clients for your business.

Qualifications

Maura trained in Music and Media Technologies at Trinity College – a 2 year (1996-1998) full-time programme, and she qualified with a first class honours Masters in Philosophy in Music and Media Technologies .  This was a very demanding and enjoyable course.  Starting on the course in 1996, I could only just about turn on a computer.  By the end of the course, I was writing DSP (Digital Signal Processing Programmes) for the computer chipboard, proudly building an echo from input audio. Several of the courses completed during this time were in the area of internet and mulitimedia technologies.  I built my first website for a now disbanded Irish Composers Group (not the composers, they are still working away) called Composers ink, for an assignment for the multimedia technology course (one of many courses on the programme) in 1998.

Background

My working time is spent working on freelance web design projects, and part-time lecturing one day a week on the Music and Media Technologies programme, Trinity College Dublin. See:http://www.mee.tcd.ie/mmt.  It is on the one day a week commute to Trinity College that many photographs are taken..not to mention other travels and events that catch the eye!!

Before Web Design

In a past life, Maura was a full-time teacher and part-time lecturer in Adult and Community Education. Her primary B.A degree is in Music and Mathematics (1984) and she has several post graduate degrees in Education. Extensive experience in the education sector means that Maura can assist you  in coming to a better understanding of the ins and outs of getting a website designed and updated and provide a personable service in the delivery of your website, ensuring you get a  well designed and organised web presence.

I am from Co. Leitrim, but am happily settled in the sunny south east of Carlow.  Although I miss the drumlins and lakeviews from my parents farm in Co. Leitrim, Carlow is beautiful too and a bit of an Irish Hidden Treasure, with its friendly people, excellent infrastructure, amazing scenery and climate, and a lovely place to live and work.