Marius Veltan, Developer in Timișoara, Timiș County, Romania
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Marius Veltan

Verified Expert  in Engineering

WordPress Developer

Location
Timișoara, Timiș County, Romania
Toptal Member Since
March 1, 2022

Marius is a resourceful web developer with 10 years of experience in the WordPress ecosystem. With a firm grasp of back-end and front-end technologies, Marius has built custom themes and plugins, optimized websites, performed long-term maintenance and support, and cleaned hacks. Marius loves combining his technical knowledge with his soft skills and constant drive for personal development to shape the best solutions to the challenges he encounters.

Portfolio

Freelance Web Developer
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, jQuery, CSS3, HTML5, Linux, OS X, Git, APIs, NGINX...
Presslabs
WordPress, JavaScript, jQuery, CSS, HTML, NGINX, Linux, Git...
Continental Automotive Systems
Embedded C, Embedded Controllers, QA Testing, Process Flows...

Experience

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

WordPress, Amazon Web Services (AWS), NGINX, Git, Sublime Text, JavaScript, CSS3, Sass, Visual Studio Code (VS Code)

The most amazing...

...project I've worked on was building an API that was fully harnessed into the WordPress CMS to integrate with an iOS app.

Work Experience

Full-stack WordPress Developer

2013 - PRESENT
Freelance Web Developer
  • Implemented custom themes and plugins for WordPress websites.
  • Optimized websites for the best loading times and tested them with PageSpeed Insights (PSI), GTmetrix, Pingdom speed test, and others.
  • Cleaned hacked websites and resolved vulnerabilities.
Technologies: WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, jQuery, CSS3, HTML5, Linux, OS X, Git, APIs, NGINX, MySQL, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Experience Design (XD), Sketch, Figma, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google AdSense, Google Tag Manager, Facebook API, HubSpot, Web Development, Query Optimization, Web Speed, Performance Tuning, API Integration, Stripe, Performance Optimization, Ajax

Web Developer

2014 - 2015
Presslabs
  • Provided customer support and ensured uptime of high-traffic WordPress websites.
  • Implemented custom themes and plugins for high-traffic WordPress websites.
  • Handled website migrations, customizations, and optimizations for the best possible performance and security.
  • Managed a team of four WordPress engineers providing customer support.
Technologies: WordPress, JavaScript, jQuery, CSS, HTML, NGINX, Linux, Git, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Team Management, PHP, MySQL, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Themes, Query Optimization, Web Speed, Performance Tuning, Performance Optimization, Ajax

Senior Software Developer

2011 - 2014
Continental Automotive Systems
  • Implemented middleware software to support the cluster interface for fully connecting a vehicle to the driver's phone.
  • Designed requirements and wrote robust test cases for code modules.
  • Collaborated with QA engineers in debugging issues.
Technologies: Embedded C, Embedded Controllers, QA Testing, Process Flows, Technical Requirements

Human Resources Coordinator

2012 - 2013
Board of European Students of Technology
  • Managed the human resources team, overseeing team integration, mentoring, training, and communication.
  • Ensured the integration and development of the organization's members by understanding their needs, devising solutions, and resolving conflicts.
  • Implemented a new approach to recruiting new volunteering members for the organization.
  • Delivered training sessions on technical topics and soft skills.
Technologies: Human Resources (HR), Team Management, Recruiting, Training, Project Management, Conflict Resolution, Fundraising

Quality Assurance Engineer

2009 - 2011
Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise
  • Performed complex QA testing on applications built for the telecommunications sector and running on the Solaris operating system.
  • Investigated and documented UI issues that caused a degraded UX. Collaborated with the development teams to implement the appropriate fixes.
  • Implemented scripts to automate testing procedures and operating system installations on multiple machines running in the same network.
Technologies: Unix, Solaris, VirtualBox, Shell, Perl, QA Testing, QA Automation

Marketing Coordinator

2008 - 2009
Board of European Students of Technology
  • Created marketing campaigns for events targeting technical students.
  • Managed a team of volunteers and handled recruiting, mentoring, and training processes within the team.
  • Created leaflets, posters, brochures, and t-shirts, from design to print.
Technologies: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Premiere Pro, CorelDRAW, Design, Marketing Campaign Design, Training, Fundraising, Team Management, Adobe Flash

Newsletter Campaigns on Mailchimp

I served as a front-end developer in this 1-year engagement, representing a collaboration with a real estate broker in the USA who required help building MailChimp newsletter templates for email campaigns he would send out to his clients twice a week.

My responsibilities involved coding the templates based on the designs received as Photoshop mockups, as well as testing out that the resulting emails behave correctly in any of the email clients specific to his list of subscribers when viewed on desktop or mobile.

Implementation of Infinite Scroll for a Tech Magazine Website

As a JavaScript developer, I implemented an infinite scroll mechanism for a WordPress website. The owners of the online tech magazine wanted a way to keep readers engaged and continue reading without leaving the current URL through clicks and navigation actions. I devised an algorithm for loading the cached content to have it ready as soon as the content currently being browsed exits the viewport. I also integrated the scroll events with calls to the Google Analytics API. A new page visit would be recorded whenever the content cached in the upward or downward scroll direction enters the viewport. The JavaScript code in charge of loading the content would send server requests to URLs kept in the server cache to avoid any lags associated with database queries.

Comparitech Project

https://www.comparitech.com/
I worked as a freelance website and lead WordPress developer during a 5-year collaboration with Comparitech from 2016 to 2021. Toward the end of the engagement, I recruited the new in-house, full-time developers who joined the team.

KEY ACTIVITIES
• Maintained the website functionality.
• Constantly optimized the website for the best performance and loading times.
• Transformed new layouts into custom themes.
• Built custom plugins.
• Tweaked the site for accessibility.
• Wrote requirements.
• Integrated and tested the work done by third-party collaborators.

Web Development at CareersInMusic.com

https://www.careersinmusic.com/
As part of this ongoing collaboration in 2015, I performed general maintenance, support, and optimizations for Careersinmusic.com and Careersinfilm.com. I have implemented multiple functionalities via widgets, shortcodes, custom plugins, and new templates based on Photoshop mockups. I have also tweaked the website layout to be pixel-perfect and performed periodic optimizations to ensure optimum loading times.

A Telematics and Fleet Management Company Project

I worked as a WordPress and HubSpot developer for a company developing software and hardware equipment for managing fleets of vehicles. The client has one WordPress website in the language of each country where they activate. They also use HubSpot to collect leads and better market their products.

As part of this collaboration, some of my responsibilities include creating custom WordPress plugins and implementing new layouts in the WordPress theme as the websites evolve. The websites are implemented using Elementor. I also worked with HubSpot to create and update landing pages, adjust and customize contact forms, and implement HubSpot chatbots.

NGO Website Maintenance

As part of this collaboration, I worked as a pro bono WordPress developer in charge of maintaining the website of a Romanian NGO working with children in foster care centers.

My responsibilities included keeping the website secure and up to date and implementing any custom functionality needed. I also provided the team with necessary information about WordPress admin and creating or editing content.

Launching an eCommerce Website

As part of a collaboration from July 2017 to February 2018, I worked as a senior WooCommerce developer in charge of launching an eCommerce website for a German company.

RESPONSIBILITIES
• Set up the domain and configured DNS records via CloudFlare.
• Set up transactional email support via AWS Simple Email Service.
• Set up hosting on AWS on an Ubuntu server.
• Implemented the website design based on Photoshop mockups into a custom theme with WooCommerce support.
• Integrated the website with the Klarna payment gateway.
• Integrated the website with a warehouse management application.
• Implemented dedicated scripts to bulk-import products and stocks from each supplier tailored to their API or scraped scripts to fetch the product information and image gallery from the supplier website, using the product SKUs received in Excel sheets as a liaison.
• Assisted the company on-location with setting up their IT infrastructure in their office and physical store.

Support and Maintenance for an eCommerce Website

This is an ongoing collaboration that started in 2019. The client owns a series of eCommerce and presentation websites in the office furniture and office storage solutions domain. As the WooCommerce developer handling these websites, I perform the following tasks regularly:

• Providing maintenance and testing—updating WordPress and plugins, ensuring the hosting server is in good shape and properly secured, and fixing any conflicts arising from plugin updates.
• Implementing landing pages and popups.
• Customizing the purchasing experience, from displaying product information to the checkout and cart steps.
• Speeding up optimizations for enhanced page loading times.

In 2020, I was tasked with integrating the website with Stripe as a payment gateway. From 2020 to 2021, with the onset of the pandemic, the demand for office furniture increased as people turned to working from home. As a result, website traffic increased. I was then tasked with migrating to the Cloudways hosting service and making code adjustments to ensure the website has proper support for caching via Cloudflare. I also integrated the website with transactional emails provided by SendGrid.

A Membership Website Project

I work as a senior WordPress developer on a website that requires users to create a member account to read, post, and comment on content. The website was implemented in WordPress, and the membership features were supported by the Ultimate Member plugin.

RESPONSIBILITIES
• Enhancing the writing experience to allow users to post text and links in a similar fashion as Facebook or Twitter, generating a preview of their post if it includes a link.
• Improving the commenting experience by switching to an approach that saved comments via Ajax calls to the server.
• Implementing additional functionality on top of the Ultimate Member plugin to give users credit points for the actions performed on the website.
• Implementing the functionality to allow the website to send users periodic notifications via email containing website updates and to let them know how other users interact with their content.
• Implementing an algorithm to enhance the way the content was fetched from the database, taking into account the posts previously liked by the user browsing the website.
• Implementing a custom API for a mobile app that allowed interaction with the website content.

A Telecommunications Company Project

As part of this ongoing collaboration that started in July 2022, I work as a WordPress and HubSpot developer in the web development team. I am tasked with activities that involve either HubSpot or WordPress adjustments for the company's presentation website.

I have implemented a fresh HubSpot theme with custom HubSpot modules based on the client's requirements, using the same layout of similar sections of the website.

Web Development for a Content Website Using Headless WordPress

As part of this collaboration, I implemented custom WordPress API endpoints to deliver the information specific to the client's content website. The client did not want to use the existing WordPress REST API because they needed to deliver the data in a custom format. The website employed the headless WordPress approach, using the WordPress admin side to add the content and a React app to render it. I also built the React app based on Figma wireframes. The website featured content that was only accessible via a monthly subscription, and accessing the content was only possible after logging in with a subscriber account.

WordPress Development for a Home Design Blog

As part of this long-term collaboration that started in 2015, I served as the website's full-stack developer and maintainer. The website is a high-traffic blog with content on home and interior design topics. The website owner periodically tasks me with activities such as:

• Updating the layout of certain website sections.
• Implementing new functionality as custom WordPress plugins or as part of the custom theme, as needed.
• Making code adjustments to improve SEO management, which is handled by the Yoast SEO plugin.
• Implementing custom scripts to perform automatic search and replace actions on the database in bulk, using regular expressions and more complex conditioning, to filter the items to be considered for the changes.
• Performing new speed optimization rounds—as search engines adjust their ranking criteria and as we update plugins and WordPress—to ensure the website maintains a Google PageSpeed score above 80%.

Implemented an eCommerce Web Store

https://oppostore.ro/
As a full-stack developer, I took on the full responsibility of building the theme and functionality of the web store according to the client's requirements. Some of the tasks involved were:

• Coding the layout in a custom WordPress theme.
• Integrating WooCommerce with the WordPress theme.
• Implementing custom functionality on top of WooCommerce for handling variable products, fidelity points, and discounts.
• Integrating and testing the interoperability of the website with a payment gateway, a billing application, and the selected delivery service.

The implementation of the online store was a short-term, fast-paced project with a duration of six weeks. I took the website from mockup concepts to the launched version, with products and content loaded and ready to serve customers.

Languages

PHP, CSS, HTML, CSS3, HTML5, Sass, JavaScript, C++, Java, Python, C, Perl, Embedded C

Platforms

WordPress, Linux, WooCommerce, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Amazon Web Services (AWS), HubSpot, Unix, Solaris, OS X, Ubuntu Linux

Storage

WP Engine, MySQL, Cloudways, Cache

Other

PSD to HTML, PSD to WordPress, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Themes, Web Speed, Performance Tuning, English, Page Speed Optimization, Site Speed Optimization, Ajax, PSD to Mailchimp, Performance Optimization, APIs, Cloudflare, Caching, SEO Tools, Yoast SEO, Content Management, eCommerce, Regular Expressions, Web Hosting, Query Optimization, Elementor, API Integration, Web Scraping, Scraping, Landing Pages, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, Communications Electronics, Machine Learning, Microcontroller Programming, QA Testing, QA Automation, Design, Marketing Campaign Design, Training, Fundraising, Team Management, Embedded Controllers, Process Flows, Technical Requirements, Human Resources (HR), Recruiting, Conflict Resolution, DNS, Accessibility, Web Development, Electronics, User Experience (UX), Headless Software, Login & Registration, Payment Gateways, Leads, Internalization, Ultimate Membership Pro, Membership Sites, User Engagement, Communication, Newsletters, Newsletter Design, Newsletter Templates

Libraries/APIs

jQuery, REST APIs, Google AdSense, Facebook API, Stripe, React

Tools

Git, Asana, SendGrid, Mailchimp, NGINX, Sublime Text, VirtualBox, Shell, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Premiere Pro, CorelDRAW, Adobe Experience Design (XD), Sketch, Figma, Google Analytics, Adobe Flash, AWS IAM, Screaming Frog

Paradigms

Hosting, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), UI Design

Frameworks

JSON Web Tokens (JWT)

Industry Expertise

Telecommunications, Project Management

2010 - 2012

Master's Degree in Software Engineering

Politehnica University of Timișoara - Timișoara, Romania

2006 - 2010

Bachelor's Degree in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering

Politehnica University of Timișoara - Timișoara, Romania

JUNE 2005 - PRESENT

Certificate in Advanced English

University of Cambridge

Collaboration That Works

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