Career Summary
I began building websites way back in 1996, and have had a 30 year long career in various roles from design, development, web project management, business analysis, corporate, franchise and partner development and much more.
Freelance Website Designer - 1996 to 2000
My early web career between 1996 and late 2000 was spent as a freelance website designer, trading as 288 Online
, creating and maintaining websites for businesses of all sizes in a range of different industries.
Hertz: 2000 to 2021
After 4 successful years as a freelance web designer, in September 2000 I was invited to join Hertz Europe as senior web designer. Hertz is a global car rental company with more than 8,000 locations worldwide, and they were putting together a team of web experts to build and maintain their e-commerce platform.
Here are just a few highlights from that 21 year career.
Managing partnership and franchisee implementation
My role at Hertz also involved managing a number of corporate partner websites for several airline partners, including Ryanair, Aer Lingus, Air France and Qatar Airways, as well as the development and launch of a loyalty scheme rewards portal for Hertz's partnership with Nectar.
Managing those partnerships along with Hertz franchisees, and being in the core team for a multi-million dollar global digital transformation project, many air miles were clocked up with frequent travel between offices in the UK and various locations in the US and Europe.
Payment Security and Compliance
In addition to the above I was also responsible for managing the original implementation of 3D Secure onto the Hertz main web platform, which allowed us to handle card payments more securely via the Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode processes.
Pricing Clarity
A very significant area of responsibility was when I headed up pricing clarity and global compliance for Hertz between 2014 and 2021 to meet the requirements of the EU Commission, the CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) and other governing bodies around the globe.
This meant... among other things... ensuring that we were being ultra transparent on price, so that customers know exactly:
- what they would get for their money,
- what was included,
- what was not included,
- the cost of optional add-ons,
- mandatory fees and taxes,
- cancellation options and charges,
- etc.
As part of the pricing clarity and transparency initiative, I became responsible for the implementation and management of the dynamic delivery of relevant Terms and Conditions and other dynamic legal and advisory messaging based on the customer type, their location, destination, age, and other criteria and selections they make during the reservation process.
This provided me with invaluable knowledge and experience which I still draw on to this day, as founder of TargaCalc.
Project management and testing
Development at Hertz never stood still. There was constant development of the main core platform, the backend systems, and of the 3rd party websites which interacted with our systems.
Such intense, consistence and widespread development required meticulous attention to detail, not only in the planning and documentation, but also in the testing. Therefore the following types of testing always formed part of the development process.
- A-B testing and multivariate testing on prototypes to ensure that we were designing and developing what customers wanted.
- User Acceptance Testing to ensure that what had been development satisfied the business requirements for each project before the projects go live.
- Regression Testing to ensure that everything which worked before the development of new projects still worked after their completion.
Pulling all of my experiences in web development, business analysis, project management, testing, franchisee and partnership management, pricing clarity and transaparency together, my last couple of years at Hertz involved me in a lot of international travel, to Miami and Estero in Florida, Park Ridge in New Jersey, Austin in Texas, and various locations in Europe.
This was part of a core team from Europe who were key to steering the planning and development of a huge multi-million dollar digital transformation, which also involved working with IBM teams in London and the US.
However, when Covid brought much of the world to it's knees, I decided to leave Hertz to return to web development under my own efforts, and this TargaWeb was born.
TargaWeb
TargaWeb was founded by me in early 2021 by me, just after the covid pandemic.
TargaWeb provided a range of web design, development, testing and consultancy services to help businesses of all sizes with their online presence. A number of articles on many aspects of web design, testing, SEO, etc., were written by myself during that time.
However, the production of websites for small to medium size businesses was becoming increasingly commodised, and in a search for something significant to differentiate TargaWeb from it's competitors, I realised that some pricing calculators which I had already build for TargaWeb and a couple of clients held the answer.
The decision was made to focus fully on developing pricing calculators, and to rename and rebrand from TargaWeb to TargaCalc.
TargaCalc
Having fully transitioned over from web desing, TargaCalc is now establishing itself as a specialist pricing calculator development business that designs and builds sophisticated pricing calculators, cost estimators, quote calculators, and sales-assist tools for a wide range of industries and business models.
