
Marius Veltan
Verified Expert in Engineering
WordPress Developer
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
Experience
- PHP - 13 years
- MySQL - 13 years
- WordPress - 10 years
- PSD to WordPress - 10 years
- Sass - 8 years
- jQuery - 8 years
- REST APIs - 8 years
- WooCommerce - 6 years
Availability
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
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.
Web Developer
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.
Senior Software Developer
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.
Human Resources Coordinator
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.
Quality Assurance Engineer
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.
Marketing Coordinator
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.
Experience
Newsletter Campaigns on Mailchimp
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
Comparitech Project
https://www.comparitech.com/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/A Telematics and Fleet Management Company Project
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
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
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
• 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
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
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
WordPress Development for a Home Design Blog
• 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/• 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.
Education
Master's Degree in Software Engineering
Politehnica University of Timișoara - Timișoara, Romania
Bachelor's Degree in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering
Politehnica University of Timișoara - Timișoara, Romania
Certifications
Certificate in Advanced English
University of Cambridge
Skills
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
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
Paradigms
Hosting, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), UI Design
Frameworks
JSON Web Tokens (JWT)
Industry Expertise
Telecommunications, Project Management
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
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