Web Designer &
Digital Marketer
Where design meets people, let’s publish!
Living in Sydney, Australia.
Usually Designer and Marketer, sometimes with Front-end Developer mode activated.
May 2019: Seeking remote or Australian based Digital Marketing or UI Design roles. Message me on LinkedIn or email.
Biography
Hey there, I’m a Product Web Designer (currently seeking roles) with a background ranging from web hosting (VPS, DNS, Linux, AWS, GCP, Cloudflare) to online marketing (Social Media, SEO and logo generation in Adobe Illustrator) who grew up in Sydney, Australia.
I studied Bachelor of Information Technology Co-op at UTS from 2012 – 2016 and it (opened my mind to several different fields of IT and workplaces).
I’ve worked in startups to corporates and back to startups, ranging from IT Support, Web Developer, Web Hosting, Online SEO and Social Media Marketing to UX and UI Design.
I’m a huge fan of HBO Silicon Valley, (and VERY highly recommend watching the series if you haven’t, there are 5 seasons so far, with 24 min episodes) and after reading:
◦ The Google Story by David A. Vise back in 2012 on my 1.5 hour commute to corporate work and:
◦ Without Their Permission by reddit Co-founder Alexis Ohanian in 2013, I built up a huge admiration towards the whole startup ethos.
Little did I know how tough building a startup can be at the time though, – I was primarily interested in computer networking at the time because I was always fixing home networks, and was studying an introduction to enterprise networking subject at UTS as a core subject of my degree, and thought that’s what it took to scale Google – no doubt it did, but that was just 1 of probably 25 other different fields needed to scale a company to that extent.
I keep coming back to my design (and web hosting) skills time and time again, and is where I currently see my future in. I’m heavily visually minded and never get bored of design. I love how there’s always so much to learn at every corner (especially with Adobe’s Suite and UX tools like InVision and WordPress or other CMSs!) and with design you can go at your own pace in order to make something that fits the right audience!
I constantly think of effective ideas and am usually the first to spot bugs in any site or app that I use. I leave no stone unturned when using any product or service; the ultimate stress tester from a UI standpoint. I’ve definitely used over a 1000 sites and apps in my time. (An average browsing session with me has about 246 tabs 
).
I was lucky enough to visit San Francisco in September 2018 for TechCrunch Disrupt as a Web Volunteer. I was amazed at the amount of tech vibe there is there; basically every corner there is a tech company, you see tech companies sticking out on the highways, only to end up in Palo Alto, Mountain View and Sunnyvale which are big tech towns but submerged in urban forest, containing companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, LinkedIn and even Amazon had an office on the freeway (although Amazon’s HQ is in Seattle).
My current long-term goal is to hopefully become an Interaction Designer, specialising in animated motion UI graphic flows. (Adobe Affect Effects) and just ensuring that user flows are properly made and maintained throughout the duration of a product’s lifecycle.
If you’re a Designer, Front-end Developer or know anyone in this space, I’d love to hear from you, drop me a line! You can usually find me attending startup meetups around Sydney.(Fishburners Pitches, Lean Startup Sydney, Growth Marketing, UI/UX, WordPress Sydney).
One of my favourite blogs run by a Senior Interaction Designer at Google is First Time UX by Krystal Higgins. She has presented at numerous UX conferences around the world:
Another great recent UX panel I came across was from a San Francisco based startup called NoiseAware – Basically an IoT noise level monitoring device for AirBnB properties (so Landlords can be reassured that their place is safe and sound during tenant stays).
I also run a Web Design Studio in Sydney at Siteroo.com.au, providing Web Hosting, Design and web UX design services such as custom theming & usability testing to the world.
______________
SKILLS:
‣ PRODUCT DESIGN
████░░ 70%:
• UX: Ideation, User Research; Personas, Scenarios, Analytics
• UI: Prototyping interactive wireframes, Usability Evaluation, QA
• UXPin.com, InDesign (logos)
‣ WEB ENGINEERING ████░ 85%:
• WordPress (Front-end Page Builders including Elementor, Divi), Shopify CMS
• HTML/CSS, Java, PHP
• AWS (EC2, Route 53, S3), Google Cloud (Compute Engine), Nginx & Apache
• Linux Command Line: traceroute, nslookup, dig -x, whois, ping, wget/curl, SSH
• Network: DNS, TCP/UDP, DHCP, OSI
‣ MARKETING ████░░ 75%:
• Social Media Curation, Buffer, HootSuite
• Google Analytics, Bit.ly, goo.gl, FB Ads, MailChimp
• SEO (Google Keywords, My Business, Domain Authority)
Say hi!
Hi there,
Is your website or app in need of a revamp, testing or simply needs to get designed? Feel free to contact me at my email address or social media handles above.
We can catch up for coffee or a Skype call too if that’s your thing. 🙂
1997
Played CD-ROM games & Lego.com Shockwave games. Not a Bad effort considering I was 4 here. I remember seeing the Netscape icon. The first game I ever remember playing: Lego Junkbot!
Early - Mid 2000s
Reinstalled Windows ME & XP over 40 times, played Age of Empires, Sim City, upgraded to 400MB a month Optus Broadband from Dialup – Hoorah! 👏
Seriously, the introduction of broadband was the best thing ever, despite still being ADSL2+ in 2018 in a lot of homes (In Australia). It meant your 99% download wouldn’t fail when your Mum picked up the phone.
2009
Built My First Website for IT Consulting
Used Adobe Dreamweaver back in High-School to create my first website and logo for an IT servicing business.
December 2010
Having heard a lot of buzz around Android, I finally took the early-ish plunge into Androidhood.
Previously I had used an iPod Nano (2005 – 8) – this was like the greatest invention at the time; it meant I could carry 1000s of songs with me at any time I wanted, it was a GOD SEND for those boring weekends away at grandparents’ homes (we had a PS2 + Lego, but music just made all the difference and the earphone quality was paramount, everyone was raging about how great quality the earphones were, so much so, my cousins used them on their portable DVD players! What a time to be alive, ay?), iPod Touch (2008 – 11) and Nokia 3200 (Yes, it had a game called Bounce and Space Invaders on a 1MB resolution screen with ‘polymorphic’ ringtone)
2010 - 2011
Designed & Built VB.NET Video Games (Finished HSC – University Entrance Exams)
Studied Software Design & Development for my HSC (university entrance exam), I had to learn VB.NET, code a SnakeX, Space Invaders and Light Cycles (Tron), complete with a user manual I typed. (User onboarding is my favourite area, I give it a lot of attention writing and designing for newcomers!).
December 2011
Built My Own Gaming PC (as soon as I saved my first AUD $1500)
Having being a 12-18 year old teen who was always into PC gaming such as Battlefield 2 and Command & Conquer 3, it was a real pain point when most of my favourite games wouldn’t run on my family’s 512MB RAM integrated HP desktop PC FOR YEARS. (I had an interim HP 9600M GT gaming laptop, but it ran very hot and performance was never as good as a desktop as a result).
I read up on every component inside PCs; RAM, CPU, GPUs, PSUs, Motherboards, watched countless PC part product reviews and how-to build videos (Linus Tech Tips is a renowned tech review channel). Full specs here.
Now I don’t game at all, I use 2 MacBook Pros (for design and web hosting work) and donated this beast to my Brother. I still prefer Windows Explorer over Mac’s Finder, especially for photo/video browsing) and the taskbar is definitely better in Windows, although I use HyperDock for Mac, but it does not work in Mojave and a bit buggy in prior releases. 1 thing I totally hated about Windows were the forced Windows updates which would forcefully restart your PC even if you had work open. Bad Microsoft. 😡 (There is a registry fix around this: Win 7, Win 10, but it doesn’t stick in Windows 7 and it still means it isn’t the default behaviour like how Macs give you the CHOICE of when to restart for updates (I know the irony there, Apple doesn’t tend to give many choices to its users, but in this instance we’re blessed). 🍎🛐
January 2012
July - December 2012
5 February 2013
Saw Sir Tim Burners-Lee (Creator of HTML & WWW) Live in Sydney
It was also the first time I used a hashtag to live tweet for a Q&A event!
See my tweets here from the event.
What initially made W3C pursue XHTML 2 instead of a backwards compatible mark-up language, HTML5, initially developed by WHATWG?#sydcitytalk
— Stefan Caliaro (@stefancaliaro) February 5, 2013
February 2013
Custom Coded Websites in HTML/CSS and jQuery Plugins
Learned what HTML, CSS & JavaScript was, and how they all worked together to deliver web user experiences.
First Portfolio Site – Done with media queries off by hand for EACH element.
July 2015 - January 2016
Interned at Cisco in Product Support
September 2015
Co-Designed and Developed an Anonymous Messaging App at AWShine in a Team of Four
I implemented the Facebook login functionality with Firebase DB and FB Login API, tested the web app on multiple Android and iOS devices (spoke to and explicitly shadowed users in different teams about their initial experience using it), and was able to give a huge insight to the team about other apps in the market or in beta which were aiming to achieve nearly the same functionality as Bubble7. (But Bubble7 was still different even after all the market research I had done since 2014 from a previous geolocation app idea).
2017
The juggernaut of website, application and AI/ML/Big Data web hosting services.
1 month here honestly felt like 4 months working somewhere else; the rate of learning was mind blowing. 🤯 I dealt with EC2, S3 and some RDS. Their systems and dashboard (console) are highly complex (same as Google Cloud, but Google Cloud makes it look neater).
I first heard of AWS back in 2013 while volunteering for a startup at Fishburners (all that I knew was that startups needed it to scale). It took me about a few months to work out EC2 and regions, and I had 1 year prior hosting experience with zuver.net.au (shared hosting 🤮) and DigitalOcean.
One of the tasks involved combining my creative flair for designing diagrams and technical cloud computing skills from prior AWS experience I had.
March 2018 - Present
Worked at an SEO agency and started Siteroo.com – Handcrafted Websites
Using WordPress Elementor.com (what this site is built on too), Google Cloud Compute Engine, Cloudflare CDN, Hotjar.com for user heat mapping, Drift for instant message chat, Google Analytics and SEO best practices.
2019 & Beyond
Keeping things looking and running cool in Content/UI/UX Product Design, Content Writing & WordPress Design roles foremost
There you have it! Around 20 lucid years of experience dealing with technology solutions. 🧐👨💻
“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.” – Michelangelo
Have an opportunity or course to recommend? I’d love to hear from you. Available for hire in Sydney, Australia and remote roles.
