Who I Am
My name is Damian Counsell.
- I build Websites;
- I do bioinformatics; and
- I make music and other media content.
I help organisations and individuals to store and share digital data, publish and debate online, and explain and sell technology. I specialize in projects that cross linguistic and national boundaries.
Who I work for
I build and run Websites for many small businesses in the English West Midlands, where my physical office is located; but I also operate nationally and internationally, and my main client is:
- HiFiBiO, a biotech start-up company based in Paris, France and Boston, MA.
I have also done work for:
- The Digital Archiving Consultancy—on whose behalf and independently I’ve done work for:
- The European Commission in Brussels and Lisbon,
- The Center for Documentation and Research in Abu Dhabi, and
- GridwiseTech in Kraków and elsewhere.
- Index on Censorship,
- Prospect Magazine,
- The International Federation of Journalists,
- The Chartered Quality Institute, and
- Imagine Art After.
Where I come from
I used to do science in academic research institutes. I specialized in bioinformatics. I am a co-author of this European Commission report about the sharing of scientific data, a project I was invited to join after the closure of the Medical Research Council’s Human Genome Mapping Project Resource Centre in Cambridge, UK, where I used to do work.
At the Bioinformatics.Org Website, you can read my science CV, and also download other publications I have written or contributed to. Occasionally, I speak to drug companies and I am still one of the directors of that organization.
Local clients
I am now based in Tamworth in Staffordshire near Birmingham on the Manchester Picadilly-London Euston line, and do a lot of work for clients based in this area. I build custom Websites for small- and medium-sized businesses, often creating and assembling video, still image, and other multimedia and text content for them—for example for Sutton Coldfield-based tree surgeon Vito DiMarco and his business Treewise Tree Services.
How I can help you
Do you want a Website? Get in touch. Regardless of what you want it to do, if your specific requirements aren’t things I specialize in, I can find you a specialist and give you advice that could save you money and trouble.
Do you want to sell high technology products or services online? Thanks to my interdisciplinary and academic past, I have a wide knowledge of tech terms and principles, and a talent for communicating difficult ideas to potential customers.
I can also provide a range of related services. Perhaps you want to rescue an archive of documents stored in a defunct proprietary format and share them on the Web or with colleagues, or you need someone to build a high-traffic international blog for you, or you already have a Website and would like people to be able to find it more easily. Perhaps you’ve just lost a lot of data in a hard drive crash and want someone who can get it back cheaply.
Even if I can’t help you myself, I probably know someone who can.
How I operate
I build Websites with free software, especially WordPress. In my old work, I relied on, championed, and contributed to open standards and open software. In my new work, I try to do the same. This doesn’t mean I’m a zealot, but free tools are often the best tools. Some of my favourites include Linux, Apache, MySQL/PostgreSQL, PHP, and bash.
So your Website works on mobile devices and can be seen by the widest range of visitors, I also use free Web design frameworks like Sage, YAML and Sandbox. Thanks to YAML, for example, this Website is readable even under Internet Explorer 6, but, if you are using that Web browser, then, please, for the love of Tim, get a better one.