About Me
Matt Hayward (I often talk about myself in the third person :p) is a web site producer in Melbourne Austraila. The categories on this site, and their weightings, should show you what i’m into. Since starting uni in 1995, i’ve been in the web game, well since 1999 professionally. My primary concern is the web site www.telstrawholesale.com and has been for nearly 3 years now. I’ve produced hundreds of web projects, some massive, many small. Nevertheless it’s always challenging and enjoyable as every project brings new mind benders to address.
I am 28 years old, Melbourne born and graduated from Monash University in 1999 with a Bachelors of Communication. Originally from Ferntree Gully, there’s not many inner city suburbs I haven’t lived in!
About this site
Blogs and Wikis really are what the internet should really be about: rapid development, collaboration and communication. So after experimenting with several blogs, wikis and even forums i’ve grown quite fond of Wordpress 1.5 (after a painful upgrade from 1.x).
The worm turns…
Yes my old site had a lot of car pics. It was again mixing business with pleasure. The business was Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and in that regard the old matthayward.com was pretty successful. It also taught me a lot of PHP code. The new one is starting from scratch, with my Google ranking suffering accordingly. But there’s an old Japanese saying ’sit on a stone, wait three years’. It translates poorly but hopefully you get the gist!
The car pics aspect left a very sour taste in my mouth. Frankly a lot of the earlier pictures weren’t that good and some of the most illiterate people on earth kept asking for them. Even worse, all these punters emailing me assuming that every single car in every single pic, belonged to me. It was time for that to go and have a more flexibile Content Managment System such as a blog to narrowcast crap to the world!
So here you will find some of the more memorable car reviews from their old site, some edited for accuracy.
What I enjoy
Taking photos, some for istockphoto, especially shoots for friends bands, car reviews and stuff. I’ve done one band shoot in 2005 for The Convulsions, a Geelong heavy rockin’ band. Unfortunately I don’t really have the kit and the photography skills are amateur at best. But it’s for the fun of it and sometimes the end result polishes up OK!
Writing is a constant passion, albeit I like to keep it deliberately ‘real’ and shabby. You only have to read these articles to find that out! Writing should always be interesting and a challenge to keep it natural and real. Otherwise you might as well read the newspaper, and you don’t want to do that . . . I’ve written a few scripts and have some storyboards but never found the right team to make them happen.
Wine is a burgeoning passion in casa del Matt. Why? Because it’s an agricultural product that changes every year and takes a lot of common sense and plain good luck to make it happen. There are speculators and there are lovers and I am definitely the later. Wine’s a real motto for life being about the simple organic stuff.
Cars have always been a constant passion since I was a wee boy, particularly Japanese cars and my Ford XR6 Turbo. I don’t know what the serial numbers on an XM Falcon crank case mean or anything that nerdy. But there’s a very real danger I could talk your ears off about some of the world’s cooler cars!
Wont the real Matt Hayward please stand up!
P.S. By the way, I am not Matt Hayward the scientist with an awesome Mini in England (it’s wierd receiving emails from yourself, from someone who signs their emails the same way you do! If you’re reading Matt, stay in touch!) or the US College footy player who i’ve never spoken to. OR for that matter the baritone singer matthewhayward.com! Apparently there’s some English cricketer named Matt Hayward too. It’s just way too common a name . . .