TLDR 👇
- Over 20 years of building websites
- Focused on business requirements for quantifiable results
- SEO-driven design & site architecture
- Understanding of technical implementation
- Data-driven decisions for continued improvements
- Platform agnostic
This is my story and part of my personal roadmap. I work hard to improve my skills and help companies across the map grow their conversions. Because of this, I will update this page periodically as the story unfolds.
Where I Started
I attended one of the first online schools ever. It was called Sessions.edu and still exists today. Back then I was eyeballing graphic design as my chosen profession. Shortly after graduating, I started designing logos, brochures, and whatever else I could get my hands on.
A few clients asked about websites for their business. I was already playing around with Dreamweaver and Flash 4.0 so naturally, this piqued my interest. I had a few friends who were starting to build websites with Javascript as well so we all seemed to be heading down that inevitable path.
I took my skills to work on HTML sites, sprinkled in some JS, and got to work.
I built a handful of basic sites until I discovered Flash. Enter, Actionscript.
The Evolution
As I built more websites I discovered Joomla!… wow. It was so intriguing to me, yet so far behind the times. The icons we gross. The terminology, confusing. Nontheless, I built a few websites using it. It was frustrating, there were breaking changes, 3rd party add-ons that cost an arm and a leg. I made it work and achieved the goals that client were aiming for.
I had wondered if it would be better for me to whip up a database and start building websites more from scratch than from this janky framework. So I did. Using PHP, JS, HTML, and CSS I worked on sites that I had more control over and could make it do what I wanted. This was starting to get fun.
It wasn’t long when I discovered WordPress. It was a blogging platform and I was hoping it could replace the weirdness of blogger (which was bought out by Google).
I was keeping entries on blogger but it was too arbitrary for me to really feel an impact with. But, I didn’t have the time to build my own system out. So I started playing around with WordPress.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that WordPress was so much better than Joomla as a CMS and had some inherent flexibility that I was trying to build out on my own.
Howdy…
I started converting old sites from Joomla! and other home-grown solutions to WordPress sites. It was all themes for me those days as I got familiar with the platform. It was constantly changing, for the good, and even though things would break it was easy to mitigate.
Over the next handful of years I was building site for friends, family, friend’s businesses, and the like. It was fun exciting and a bit scary at times.
WordPress was evolving and new shiny things were coming out all the time.
Getting Down to Business
I started to move into bigger and bigger company/organization websites where the traffic they were after wasn’t just to show someone that they had a website, but to get products and service to the market so they could make money. Their website was their source of revenue.