Chris Hope is a website publisher and freelance website developer who lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

I primarily work on my New Zealand Running Calendar and Australian Running Calendar websites, but also do some freelance website development work.

I am married to Jane McNamara and have two sons, Jamie & Sam. When I’m not working and doing family stuff, I like to go trail running and brew my own beer!

Work history

I’ve been a website developer since 1998 when I set up a web development company called WEBENZ with my brother-in-law Greg McNamara and his partner at the time Jacqui Jones.

Notable work at WEBENZ included the now defunct E3 e-commerce system, which was used on dozens of websites we developed at the time; and the Minerva Mail email marketing system, which is still going to this day and which I do the odd bit of support work for.

I moved on from WEBENZ in 2003 to become a freelancer, and the company itself wound up about a year later.

Notable projects

Since 2003, I’ve worked as a freelance website & email marketing systems developer, as well as on a few of my own projects. Most of my time these days is spent on the running calendar websites.

  • Running Calendar, an event listing website, originally built with SilverStripe but later rebuilt using a bespoke CMS (PHP & MySQL/MariaDB)
  • Minerva Mail, an email marketing system built with PHP & MySQL
  • Personalised Plates, an e-commerce website built with SilverStripe (PHP & MySQL)
  • GrownUps, a lifestyle blog & social club for people aged 50+, using WordPress (PHP & MySQL)
  • The Electric Toolbox, my old programming blog, built with CodeIgniter (PHP & MySQL)
  • Proximity ID’s email marketing tool (Classic ASP, Windows Services, SQL Server)
  • Jericho’s SmartMail / ecelerity mail delivery agent (PHP, SQL Server)
  • Online Republic’s internal booking system (PHP with Smarty & MySQL) and various blogs (SilverStripe)
  • Healthy Online, an e-commerce website, built with a bespoke e-commerce application (PHP & MySQL)

Skills

As you can see from the above, I’ve worked with a few different technologies and CMS systems. Check out my skills list here in more detail.