webewl history

I moved to Rutland, Vermont in the late '80's with a notion that I'd get out of restaurant management, attempt to play some music (Killington ski area is right next door), and be closer to my parents. My adult life until then had consisted of lots of moving around and outrageous hours opening restaurants and the like and I felt a need to explore my musical side and be closer to my family.

The region was hit hard by the market crash and by 1990, the club scene had dwindled a bit. I was waiting tables and playing solo acoustic gigs. Success on the music end met with resentment on the restaurant end and I had to make a choice. Since the music wouldn't cut it year round I gave it up and while continuing to wait tables, came up with an idea for an entertainment guide. This was around '95 and I kicked it for around and finally decided that if I was going to do this I needed one of them there Macintosh computers since that's what all the graphics folks used.

So we bought "the family computer". Little did I know I needed some pretty expensive software titles and a lot of time learning and while the entertainment guide never happened (yet?), the computer captivated me. I installed everything I could get my hands on in the name of learning and started creating things with ClarisWorks, learning about the internet (getting one connected without the benefit of something simple like AOL was a bit of a challenge even in '96)...

I decided that the best way to learn was to do and begged my way into a job doing ad layout for a weekly paper. I had been volunteering some hours in the Macintosh Tech Support Chat at Talk City (now defunct) and had created several personal sites prior to this.

I built a site for my employer that was a labor of love and just a really nice looking site that was really ahead of its time. By now, I'd become a beta tester for anything having to do with the web that I could get my hands on and was pretty much right at the cutting edge of things with this site. The business changed hands and I found myself providing hardware/network support for the new owner as well as the ad/page layout thing...

I had a pretty good blowout with the new owner of the place and there is a very rich story there though the real excitement happened well after I left. If you're really interested in it, here's a link to the latest Rutland Herald article (4/16/04) on it. Suffice it to say, leaving this situation wasn't the worst career move I ever made!

Next up was the Virtual Café, an internet coffee shop where web design paid the bills. I worked as a web designer while checking people in and out, making coffee, vacuuming, etc. Foot traffic was usually slow (especially mid-afternoon) so there was time to work. It didn't take long to realize that this simply wasn't making sense. The agency providing the bulk of the design work was trying to hire me direct, and I was feeling pretty confident in my skills. It didn't make a lot of sense to go to work for these folks as by now I had a sizeable investment in Macintosh hardware and the associated software titles needed to do what I did and didn't want to go to work in a shop where I didn't have control over the tools I used.

So.... I went out on my own in 1998, found the shortest .com domain I could with the word "web" in it, and off I went. In addition to the aforementioned agency, I slowly picked up a couple of my own clients and things slowly grew. By '99 a local design firm that lost their part-time web person had a few sites that they needed help with and approached me about working with them. With another such relationship established, things seemed to be picking up.

The following year, more of a bond was created with this local design firm and a "partnership" was formed with the owner of that company, another local graphic designer, and myself. We had a great first year but the partnership came to an end when one partner got an offer by our largest client to come on board as V.P. of marketing. I stayed on for awhile (the other partner left immediately), but 6 months later when the V.P. decided that wasn't for him, we couldn't come to an agreement about how to move forward and we went our separate ways.

Since 2001, I've been on my own, and have launched numerous projects learning something new with each. In some cases many things. That's what I love about this business. You are constantly learning something new and that works for me. When things start getting mundane, I get antsy!

It has yet to get mundane.