Social proof

I hired Simon to work in the Digital Content team at Icon, and we worked together for 18 months. He was a fabulous addition to the team, bringing deep analytical skills, a talent for stakeholder engagement, and a brilliantly efficient can-do attitude. He was always up for a challenge and relished learning new skills—I don’t think there’s anything he wouldn’t have a go at. I recommend Simon without reservation to anyone looking for a top-notch content specialist—he is your man!

—Brigitte Barta, senior content leader & former Director, Digital Content @ Icon Agency

Simon is the person you want for any project involving a content ecosystem that is complicated or copious. He will turn demanding stakeholders into champions for him and the project. As well as being an outstanding content strategist and project manager, he is an all-round good egg and a person who makes you look forward to going to work. If you’re thinking of hiring him, you should.

—Tim Edwards, Digital experience manager, Burnet Institute

Simon has the rare ability to think deeply and innovatively, and consistently deliver. All while being a nice bloke. Simon can steer a large team with competing priorities, tight deadlines and complex stakeholder relationships to deliver large content projects that exceed expectations on quality. He can fire up a creative team to do great work, and help them structure a plan so it’s done on time, on budget and to a high standard.

—Rebecca Norris, Senior Strategic Advisor, Communications & Marketing, University of Melbourne

Simon is a big picture thinker who has an ability to generate inspirational ideas that I have seen become the basis of effective and expansive marketing campaigns. He has an extensive understanding of the principles of best practice for content production and can make words sing on the (digital) page.

—Felicity Cull, Head of Digital Content @ Pesel & Carr

Check out this case study published over at Icon Agency. It’s for the redevelopment of the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission’s new website.

While working for Icon, Simon played an integral role in this project. As the project’s content manager, Simon led the content and UX streams. He analysed site data, held user workshops, designed user testing (moderated and unmoderated), and conducted stakeholder interviews to understand user perceptions of the site’s tone, navigation and accessibility. He then performed a content audit of around 300 pages. He assessed content against user research and data analysis, and tagged pages for archiving, deletion, merging and rewriting. This reduced the page count to 200. Based on the results, he designed a new, concise information architecture that prioritised clear wayfinding and optimal user journeys.

Simon also managed a team of writers, rewriting content based on the audit and style guide he developed. The team achieved an average Year 7 grade level, demystifying complex language that had been a barrier to usability and delivering accessible content for diverse audiences (including senior users with diverse cognitive abilities). Simon also managed content loading into the Drupal CMS and designed a web governance framework with guidelines, checkpoints and processes for uploading, reviewing, archiving and deleting content. The new site won two Web Excellence Awards in the Health Care and Accessibility categories, while recent Google Analytics data showed that users now spend less time searching for critical information, reducing unnecessary site visits by up to 90%.