About Me

In 1996, the World Wide Web was just gaining traction in the personal PC world. At the time I was working for a global commercial insurance brokerage firm in Seattle. My coworker had just bought her first home computer and told me she used it to play cards and other games with strangers all around the world. That was all it took to convince me to buy a $1300 Pentium 100 from Micron after a bit of research to ensure full technical support for my purchase. Back then it was easy to screw things up and it was expensive to get a computer fixed. I used Micron’s tech support a lot that first year, and it was a wonderful way to get someone to hold my hand while I learned my way around PCs.

My mother predicted that having a computer at home would change my life in a huge way, and she was right. Within 6 months I was learning HTML in hopes of creating my own website. I handwrote the code for 20 complete pages, which gave me an excellent foundation for using an HTML editor. In late 1997 I built my first commercial website for a client. He ran a carpet-cleaning business and wanted a website that would be a fabulous resource for his customers and prospects. I used frames for his site <shudder> and at one point experimented with having his theme song play in the background <shudder even more>. He was my client for about 6 years, amazingly enough. I did revamp his site to take it out of frames thank goodness.

I built a few more websites for other small Seattle-area businesses, whose sites I also hosted. I wanted to provide all the services they needed, so it soon became crucial to learn about optimizing for the search engines. Back then Alta Vista was the major one; there were about ten altogether if I recall correctly. At one point I had optimized my own website (Websmithpro.com) to the point that it was listed in the top 3 for “Internet marketing”!

Fast-forward nearly 15 years, and here I am, still focusing on helping small businesses market their websites to gain visibility on search engines. Now of course Alta Vista and all the others have been usurped by Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Content is still king, and I still have trouble convincing clients to beef up their websites to attract a wider audience. Nowadays I spend most of my time creating and maintaining paid-search campaigns, i.e. pay-per-click or PPC, mostly in Google’s AdWords program.

It’s a good thing I learned to focus on marketing websites, rather than creating them, because despite my creative leanings in my offline life, my design skills never really matured. But nowadays that’s okay, too, because WordPress seems to have taken over and choosing a professional design for a website is as easy as browsing available themes and clicking the “install” button.

That’s removed all the obstacles to get down to business and start writing content… so that’s what I’m gonna do!