My first foray into the ether, which is what I affectionately call that place in the virtual world of fiber optic and copper wires, radio and microwaves that connect the millions of computers and servers to each other, came unexpectedly in 1992. All I wanted to do was my bookkeeping and taxes. I knew almost nothing about “the Internet.”

Don’t laugh, that was quite common back then in the small mountain communities I grew up and started my little floorcovering business in. My first computer, which I bought with a loan from my mother, came with Microsoft Works, which had a spreadsheet application that I first began to use to track my income and expenses. The machine also had a modem, which I was told I could connect my phone line to and connect to services like AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy. I thought, what the heck, I’ll give it a try.

Compuserve quickly became my introduction to the Net and I spent countless hours and far too much money in phone charges – over $300.00 that first month. But as I became more involved, I was led to various software and hardware that would reduce my expense, if not my time online. In fact, my time online was becoming my destination of choice for those after-work hours of connecting with my fellow humans.

Fast forward several years and I found some message boards that people were posting messages on using some strange code they called HTML. I was fascinated and soon learned some rudimentary markup to make my messages look cooler. The thrill I got from turning the plain vanilla typed message on a background of stark white pixels into something that resembled a greeting card or magazine article was palpable. I didn’t realize until then that this was creating some kind of art.

Thus began my continuing passion to create beautiful pages of content on the World Wide Web. It has been a journey of education and practice to bring not only interesting graphics and compelling writing, but to present it using quality code and methods of presentation and to optimize the pages so that they are indexed in search engines to build traffic on each site. It’s what I love to do now.

I have retired from the flooring business as a retailer and installer, but I keep my hand in by producing websites for other flooring professionals and one of the fastest growing support sites for flooring consumers and professionals. But they aren’t my only focus. I also help to develop sites for many others through my skills in design, coding and management, either directly, or through my participation on a number of webmaster support sites.

If I can be of service to you in some capacity, please contact me for a free consultation.