Portfolio

I designed my first Web site over ten years ago. It never won me any awards, and near as I know, it is still taking up space on one of the last few dusty floppy disks in a never-again-to-be-retrieved crate in my basement along with a few coffee-stained 5.25 inch floppies and the 31 install disks for Microsoft Office Professional 4.3 that I'm keeping to show my grandchildren. Over the last decade, I've worked on several hundred sites for a variety of businesses, friends, and causes. I can say from personal experience that, in the late 1990s, the term "irrational exuberance" was applicable to more than just the stock market. The Web was new and cool, and as such it should do something New & Cool--the Dancing Baby Phenomenon, if you will. And many of us fell prey to it.

I'm as guilty as many of wasting whole afternoons on New & Cool stuff that other people put on the Internet, but I believe that the Web works best and is most valuable as an informational resource. Most people will come to your site to find information, and while it's important to keep their interest, everyone's time is valuable, so the Jack Webb Approach works best: Just the facts.

I've worked on several hundred sites over the last decade, and the ones I'm proudest of are clean, simple, and to the point. They embody what I most want in a Web site as someone who uses the Internet as much as 15 hours a day. Information that's easy to find quickly, as little clutter as possible, and no dancing babies (though if you really want one, or something similar, I work with people who would be happy to help).

The sample of sites I'm presenting here serve four their own very different purposes, yet one unifying purpose at the same time: To inform as simply and straight-forward as possible.