About

Hi there, my name’s Pete Stewart; I am a digital developer and consultant. I specialise in website optimisation, front-end development, UX & UI design and MVC development, predominantly using PHP.

What I do

I mainly work with charities and NGOs to improve digital performance and user experience. I use my expertise to optimise websites so your site users don’t need to spend extra time navigating to the content they’re after.

A study done in 2009 showed that if a site takes more than 3 second to load, 40% of the users navigating to the site will have left before the page has finished loading

The most compelling results reveal that two seconds is the new threshold in terms of an average online shopper’s expectation for a web page to load and 40 percent of shoppers will wait no more than three seconds before abandoning a retail or travel site. Akamai Technologies - Report

This was a follow up study from 2006, where they showed 4 seconds was the current threshold.

Most studies done on this subject are generally focussing on retail, but this concept applies to everyone! When it comes to Charities and NGOs, the only difference is that we are mainly looking at supporters and subscriptions, rather than product sales.

If you have a website that has pages and users, or hope to have, then page speed is important!

I also offer a number of other services alongside digital consultancy and optimisation.

My background

I’ve been working as a digital developer professionally for over 12 years, but I’ve actually been making websites since 1996! I started working as a freelance consultant and developer in 2015.

Prior to this I was the Web Development Manager and Co Director for the New Internationalist. I had been with NI for just over 3 year, and still work with them on a freelance basis. I feel very proud to work with NI, as I have a huge amount of admiration for the whole team and the work they do!

For a short while before joining the New Internationalist, I worked as the Senior Developer at a startup called Gumpo. I still work on the occasional project with Gumpo.

Five years before starting at Gumpo was when I started my profession as a digital developer and designer, at a company called Matmi. I first started working at Matmi in January 2007 as a Designer / Developer, and later became the Head of Experimental Technologies. Leaving shortly before joining Gumpo at the end of 2011.

Before starting at Matmi, I studied Architecture, Graphic Design, Animation, Photography, Art History, and developed websites in my free time. For more information on my work history, you can find me on linkedin