Hundreds of websites Designed, Built & Hosted

HTML/CSS & WordPress Websites & E-Commerce Sites

Bespoke Designs & WordPress Themes/Templates

Keywords Researched – seo Strategies Formulated

Every Web Design Decision Made with Your SEO Strategy in Mind

Advanced Skills in WordPress, Photoshop & Illustrator

Also an Experienced Graphic Designer

A Keen Golfer . . . but a better Web Designer!

I Also Enjoy the Occasional Adventure . . .

If I sound like the type of freelance web designer you’d like to work with, you’re very welcome to contact me.

Benefits of using Freelance Web Designer David Mears

You pay on a project-by-project basis with no long-term contracts or tie-ins.

In addition to designing & building your website, I can provide fast, reliable website hosting for you.

No need to concern yourself with PAYE, sick pay, holiday or pension schemes.

The investment in the technology, equipment & industry leading software has already been made.

You benefit from my web design, development & SEO experience, skills & knowledge that can only be acquired by working as a freelance web designer since 2005.

I can help you ensure brand-consistency across your online & offline marketing through being able to provide you with web design, graphic design, content writing, photography & image retouching services.

I can also help with your social media presence, posts and content.

And, I can help you create Google Ads campaigns to further advertise your services online.

About Freelance Web Designer David Mears

I have been a freelance web designer since 2005 when I started out designing websites using Photoshop and then coding them in HTML and CSS using Macromedia (now Adobe) Dreamweaver. Although, the very first website I was commissioned for (#naive) I had to build in Word…yes…Microsoft Word (I did it, but certainly don’t recommend it!).

During my school years, back in the days of O-Levels and CSEs, I was lucky that my Dad could afford a Commodore Vic-20, and my Mum had the patience to sit with me and code games (from books) which were recorded onto a cassette tape. Whilst “Syntax Error” was a common occurrence, without them realising, my parents had given me coding skills.

I left school and (after a brief stint on a YTS Commercial Design Course at Kingsway Princeton College in London) I embarked on a career in design and marketing, starting my career at the tender age of 17 working for a typesetters, Wordbase, in Clerkenwell in London where I learned about Xenotron typesetting machines, flatbed scanners, photo-mechanical transfer, darkrooms, drawing boards, paste-up, Rotring pens and CS10 paper. Good times and shame that many of the aforementioned are long forgotten, not even to be found on Wikipedia.

During my time at Wordbase, I had the opportunity being able to try one of the first Macintosh SE computers…which the company Directors told me to return telling me, “it’ll never catch on” (lol). Without realising, I’d had the privilege of being part of the emergence of desktop publishing and soon became a new age graphic designer.

I left London and worked for the Essex County Council print division based in Chelmsford and then for a small printing franchise (also in Chelmsford) from where I moved to a large corporate in Brentwood and became their Marketing Assistant, where I spent many years happily providing an in-house graphic design function for them and their Sister companies. It was during this time that the World Wide Web started to have an impact and after creating the companies intranet, I was hooked on web design.

When I first started out as a freelance web designer in 2005 I studied and “specialised” in Macromedia Flash – brilliant animation software with which I built websites and created animated adverts for clients including Autoglass. I also created a courtroom presentation system for a forensic company in Chelmsford which enabled police and law professionals to show forensic evidence simultaneously on multiple monitors around the courtroom.

I studied search engine optimisation (SEO) and discovered that Flash, as brilliant as it was, could not be optimised for the search engines so I decided to focus on designing and creating HTML/CSS optimised websites. My decision was a good one as Apple later decided it was no longer going to support Flash on their devices which given the fast-growing popularity of Apple Computers meant Flash was no longer a viable tool for a freelance web designer like me.

One drawback of HTML websites was/is that clients (unless they are adept in HTML and CSS) are unable to make updates and manage their content. Therefore, I looked for a suitable Content Management System and experimented with Magento, WordPress and Concrete5, settling on the latter for its ease of use both me and my clients. WordPress for me at that time (2006/2007) left me wondering what all the fuss was about. My, how things have changed!

In 2014 I set up Mr Mears Ltd and started trading as Mears Websites, although fundamentally remaining a freelance web designer. I revisited WordPress and was thoroughly impressed with how it had been developed and when combined with a suitable theme was able to provide an outstanding platform on which contemporary websites can be built and which clients can update and manage. And that is where I am today; a freelance web designer who creates great looking, user-friendly, search engine friendly websites using WordPress. I’ve also recently built an educational website for a client using Moodle.

Perhaps some of the above resonate with you? Or maybe you are simply looking for a freelance web designer with the skills and experience I’ve described? Either way, I’d be very happy to hear from you – I wonder how many other freelance web designers worked on one of the first-ever Macintosh computers..?