Services
The services I offer, are these: web design, web development, email marketing related services and copy writing. This page will tell you how I got into these subjects. It’s a good read, promise!
Web Design
Web design speaks to my creative side. I’ve always loved drawing. I just sucked at it. And then one day I discovered a sweet bit of software called Adobe Illustrator, and things started to look pretty darn good pretty darn fast. What I never managed to accomplish using paper and pencils, was now quite literally at my fingertips. One thing led to another, and now I’m designing email templates and websites.
My design style is best described as “basic design done extremely well”. I love subtle details and you’ll definitely find them in my designs, but I’m not an artist in the traditional sense. I don’t do complex illustrations or other artsy stuff. Instead I focus on functions and features – always finding the middle ground between beauty and practicality, aiming for coolness when appropriate.
Web Development
The minute I started designing stuff, I felt an immediate urge to get the word out. What better way than to build a website, right? So I got a friend to build me a Joomla website, which turned out to be a great sandbox for discovering HTML and CSS. A few years later, I took a basic course in PHP. That really propelled me forward into the world of web development.
Soon after that, I discovered a nifty little JavaScript library called jQuery. Before I realised what was happening, I was developing a CodeIgniter based, MVC structured and AJAX powered CMS. I got it up and running (including some basic MailChimp API programming), but decided to go with WordPress instead (mainly for maintenance related reasons). The cool thing about having developed a custom CMS is the fact that it made getting to know WordPress a walk in the park: I was developing plugins and custom themes in no time.
Email Marketing
This is where it all started for me. Email marketing is a perfect mixture of design, development and killer content. It should be, anyway. Given my background in marketing (I majored in Sports Management, favouring marketing related subjects), I decided to start calling myself an email marketing consultant in late 2009. With a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS and a little bit of design and copy writing experience, I felt confident enough to start my own business.
I made mistakes and things didn’t move as quickly as I’d wanted them to, but I kept at it. The first few years were tough, both because of the economy and the fact that I had moved in with my wife, leaving behind almost my entire network – effectively placing me back at square one. I didn’t have kids during these years and because I didn’t have a *lot* of clients either, I decided to invest some time in personal development. This is the PHP course I mentioned earlier. Learning PHP was pretty awesome, because it enabled me to create custom signup forms for my email marketing clients. And since I had been working with MailChimp right from the very beginning, I started to do some API programming as well.
Fast forward to today (late October 2014): I’ve done a bunch of MailChimp API integrations (most of them in WordPress sites, both plugin based and custom coded), I’ve sent out tons of email campaigns for organizations in various industries, I’ve designed and / or developed over a hundred MailChimp templates for clients all over the world and I’m listed as an official MailChimp Expert.
Content Strategy
A lot of web designers and developers think their job is done when they’ve delivered their design or when they’ve instructed their client how to use their new website. That’s cute. But it’s wrong! This is where many website projects fail: because of a lack of content strategy.
Can one person really be good at all of those things?
Yes. I firmly believe that this is one of those situations where being good at one thing makes you better at the other. It’s hard to design a website if you don’t really know how to build one. Some (maybe even a lot of) designers will question that statement, but if you’ve ever witnessed a designer talk to a developer (I know I have), you’ll know this to be true. It goes without saying that this goes both ways: trying to build something that looks good when all you know is code, is a futile endeavour at best.
That’s why I think you should have a developer design your website and then have a designer develop it.