One of the earliest passions in my youth was tinkering with computers. It started with creative ways to break Windows 95 on the family computer, then turned to a curiosity of viewing website source code in Internet Explorer. After spending most of my teens tinkering with technology and building several websites, I swore it off as a career to pursue other interests. Eventually I meandered into the trades as a tool & die maker until the "Great Recession" forced another detour.
Sensing a local gap in talent, I then pivoted to strike out on my own for website and IT consulting services as South Shore Media. It was a great time to help small businesses get online and ride the wave of digital marketing. Within that, there were many opportunities to grow with. Google Analytics became a standard tool for traffic attribution, and Facebook was just opening up to businesses. During this era, there were a lot of old websites that needed updating from a web 1.0 static, table-based coding to ones that were rich in beautiful CSS design, interactivity, and service integrations. I was also volunteering with local non-profits and networking, to eventually work on projects for my hometown - the city itself, which was in dire need of a technology update. With that, it cemented my business as what was easily the premiere digital marketing practice in the county, if not the northwest Indiana & southwest Michigan regions.
During this time, I would partner with a local "traditional" marketing agency to provide web development services to their clients. This was a great opportunity to learn about other areas of marketing, and to work with a team of talented individuals. I was able to work on projects for a variety of clients in healthcare and other industries, even doing a project for the State of Indiana's anti-smoking campaign. When it was time to move on from that relationship, I decided to hang my contractor hat up and set my sights on the "city of big shoulders" - Chicago.
The transition worked out very well as I landed with another marketing agency in the healthcare field. No longer would I need to seek out clients myself, they were essentially brought to me. The quality of talent I was able to work with was on another level to those found in my hometown.
With a constant deluge of work, I quickly refined my skills, increased efficiency, and broadened my project experience. By this time, I felt I had a solid mastery of web development and server administration, so then wondered of what was to come next. Thankfully, I had been working with AWS since 2013 and realized my next interest was in cloud infrastructure. My next venture would have me back in consulting helping companies move from traditional, on-premise infrastructure to take advantage of the cloud.
As a curious teenager, I began my IT and web development journey sparked by discovering HTML through the "view source" feature in 90s-era browsers. It started with basic HTML, moved into Perl CGI scripts, then eventually creating a popular image gallery tool. As need and interest grew, there was plenty of opportunity to learn web hosting through cPanel, setting up forums and learning PHP, MySQL, and front/back-end customization, which laid the groundwork for a career in web development.
When making some personal sites, I began experimenting with CSS3 properties. Doing from-scratch designs, with some PHP for dynamic content.
I was able to leverage the php and hosting experience to leverage content management systems. starting with Joomla, then moving to WordPress. Thanks to the plugin architecture, I was introduced to responsive design through design templates. Eventually investing in Artisteer to streamline the process.
after having a rough go at trying to build responsively myself, I discvovered there were frameworks for that.
from freelance to fortune 100...
To see my knack for website design, see the Design page.