Humble Beginnings
I started as a web designer in 1995. I was nineteen years old and my mother was terminally ill. I was her primary caregiver and spent a good deal of time in the hospital with her. As anyone that has been in that position knows, you need something to do to keep from losing your mind. I saved up enough money to get a Toshiba notebook computer and used the phone line in the room to connect to the internet through my local ISP. With that account came a whopping 25 megabytes of space for hosting your own webpage. I was a fan of the Cartoon Network’s Toonami block showing anime programs from Japan and decided to make a small tribute page to one of my favorite shows.
I used mostly Notepad on Windows 95 as my HTML editor and taught myself by reading tutorials online and viewing the source code of sites that I liked to see how they were doing things. This was largely before the days of CSS and div elements. Most design layouts were using tables for positioning and as tables were really meant for displaying tabular data like a spreadsheet, that created a lot of problems. This was also at the time of the great browser wars, when everyone had their own way of rendering HTML and what looked beautiful to one user on a Mac using Netscape Navigator looked like something done by Picaso to another user on a Windows PC using Internet Explorer and let’s not even get into what might happen using AOL’s built-in browser.
Spreading My Wings
In the spring of 1997, my mother passed away and that left me with a great deal of free time to fill. Both of my parents were small business owners as I was growing up, so the idea of working for someone else in the traditional sense was a bit foreign to me, but I still took on a part-time job at a restaurant while expanding my skills on the web. Over the next 5 years I started learning Java, PHP, MySQL and started dabbling in using Linux based operating systems for my design/programming setup and switched from using hosting provided by my ISP or a hosting company to maintaining my own server in my home.
Embracing the Fandom
The show that started my web designing hobby turned home business had a particular website that was one of the early online communities such as Facebook or Reddit. It was small and hosted in the creator’s home and due to the costs of such things the site had to close to the public. I was a member and hated the idea of its closing as it was a place where I shared my love of the show with others and also where other budding designers and web enthusiasts exchanged ideas. I offered to host the site on my server and for almost 2 years I was the host and day-to-day administrator of an online community with about 30 thousand users, which was a hefty number for the early 2000’s.
There was a demand for a similar online community with a broader scope where fans of other shows could gather and discuss the programs and exchange ideas, so I created another site in that line using the same content management system that the original site used. It was an open-source system that the founder of the original site began and I had joined as a programmer and designer. While I was hosting the site, the founder came to say that while he came up with ideas, he left the actual design and programming to me. It worked well and that became the basis of how I worked from that time on.
Knowing My Own Limits
I’ve never considered myself that much of an artist. I have friends that are far more capable of designing images or logos than I. I try to focus on taking those images and turning them into a user experience that helps convey the meaning a client wants to put forward to the world. If you want someone to design a logo or take photos and videos, I can put you in touch with some extremely talented people. When it comes time to putting that medium onto the web in a way that will grab your audience and make them want to engage with you, that’s where I shine. While I have done some basic image manipulation and design in my time, I know that it’s not my forte and allow others to shine in those areas.
The Greater Demands of Family
In the late 2000’s, my father suffered a series of minor strokes. He was ambulatory but shouldn’t really drive and needed 24-hour supervision. He started to suffer the onset of dementia and with that came many problems. He was always fiercely independent and refused to allow anyone to have his power of attorney. There were a good number of legal battles that took their toll on my business and for some years I was pursuing web design and development more as a hobby than as a career. I was forced to take on a regular 9-5 sort of job to try to support my dad and myself. This continued until a few years ago when my father passed away and I decided that I wanted to go back to my passion. Since that time, I have been working once again as a freelance web designer.
My Experience with WordPress and Other Systems
I’ve dealt with many content management systems over the years including Joomla, Concrete5, and PHPBB, but one that I’ve had the most experience with is WordPress. Indeed, I actually used its predecessor, B2/Cafelog. I’ve contributed by submitting bug reports, suggestions on how to better it’s overall design and ease of use and just generally trying to help others use the platform.
When using it for clients, I’ve designed complete custom themes from the ground up as well as making update-safe changes to existing themes, both free and paid, as well as customizing plugins and maintaining them through major WordPress upgrades.
A Designer without a Portfolio
As much as I would love to name all the people I have worked for in the past, I maintain client confidentiality above all. I have several testimonials from those individuals they have written and given me permission to share if you are interested.
I know this may seem strange these days, but I’ve also made no question to others that I try to be a Christian, and one of those precepts of true Christian life is that for what you do in secret, God will reward you openly. I’ve extended that to my work on the internet. I prefer to be the silent tool of others, helping them achieve their goals and then moving on when they are ready to manage things for themselves.
Teaching is Part of My Service to You
I do offer hosting through outsourced companies and only host clients on my own servers if there is a need for custom services that a typical web host cannot provide. I like to leave my clients with a system that they can either manage themselves or have someone else step in to manage if something were to happen to me. My experience dealing with the aftermath of my father’s death has made me very cognizant of the need to make sure that my work can go on after me.
Part of my service to you is to help you understand just how simple your website really is to administrate, so that you can eventually feel confident in doing the day-to-day tasks yourself and leave the heavy lifting to me.