We're glad you found us. Most likely, you arrive here from one of the websites we built, and so you already know a bit about our work. Here we explain how and why we do the things we do, a little of our history explaining why we are better at our work than our competitors, links to many of our clients and projects, and a few irrelevant details that we find useful or amusing. To know our deepest motivations in working the web, you can visit our durable "soapbox," the Solar Utilities Network, and especially the article there on Sustainable Hedonism ...or read on
Nature can take care of our needs, but not necessarily our greeds.
-- Gandhi
a little history
We started helping folks integrate computers into their businesses in 1979. Our first clients were Montessori pre-schoolers, but soon we graduated to high-school students, then their teachers, and finally in the real world (whom we found, in many cases, to have more trouble wrapping their heads around computers than did our pre-schoolers.)
In 1992 a beloved student said "You need to look at this," and showed us the World Wide Web. We were delighted. Our clients have come to share our enthusiasm for the power of the web: no less than the most important new medium for information exchange since movable type. Printing in color for free! Feedback! Hypertext links that explain themselves and lead to a web of informative resources for searchers to navigate at will! Interactivity! What a great communication tool!
During 2005, our websites "published" more than 16,000,000 pages of information, instantly and faithfully, to more than three million people all over the planet ...without uprooting a single tree!
The Web: Earth at night
Being able to present meaningful, up-to-date, attractive, and lively information to a global audience using recycled electrons and existing infrastructure fulfills a dream for us, and we eagerly offer it to you: this web tool is not going away and anyone with ideas to share or products to exchange should consider taking it up.
We call ourselves "websters," and don't much like the word "webmaster." We regard the web as a demanding and rapidily evolving art form, and shrink from declaring ourselves masters of such a protean and slippery medium. Professionals practice -- doctors, for example, don't advertise themselves as "healthmasters." Like lawyering and doctoring, webstering combines craft and art. Many critters build webs, and all us critters are involved interdependently in the web of Life. Anyway, webster is shorter, and says what we do.
Here's a hot flash that still seems to escape many who work the web: This is not paper! No trees were killed to deliver this message. Nor are website visitors passive "readers" as we are with books, TV, and the movies. The web is active and interactive, better than a video game and much better than a * on glossy paper. When we help you design your web pages, we benefit from the feedback we have received and what we have learned posting thousands of other pages for our clients. One key to our success: our clients' websites look like them ...not like us.
Our calculations show that on the web, a picture is worth 4,000 words²
We are intrigued and dazzled by the web, and hope we can inspire you, too. The web is evolving so quickly -- it's a gangly teenager of a medium -- that it is impossible for most business folks to keep up to date with their businesses and the web, and make good decisions about what new developments will work well for them, and what will not. We regard the leading edge -- frames, -- with caution, using them only when they enhance our message, never just for "flash." But when a little eye-candy is called for, we're not afraid. Our clients trust us for good advice and knowledgeable guidance through what can otherwise be a costly techno-swamp.
2
The little corporate logo above (a design we are proud of) consumes 3,902 bytes, or the equivalent of about 800 words of normal text.
Worth noting: anything that isn't text (like this) is a graphic, and consumes a comparatively larger amount of bandwidth -- so we insist it carry its weight.
One important thing we have learned in our practice is that building a website, with the associated organizing, analysis, and carefully enunciation of mission and purpose, provides a business owner with a great tool for thinking about how the enterprise works best, or could be imporved most. The world of business is strewn with examples of companies that didn't understand their real business, and were busy doing something peripheral right up until they failed.
A website is structured, visible, and can usually be navigated in many ways for differing purposes. While business owners and entrepreneurs are undoubtedly their own best customers, they cannot be diverse in their approach to their business or websites -- they tend to look in the same window and walk in the same door every time. Appealing to other customers is important, and a website turns out to be a cost-effective, low-risk way to experiment with different ways to entice customers, showcase capabilities and broaden product offerings.
For us, as for our clients, the message comes first, and is best expressed in words, not images. We believe firmly that content is primary ...and we can point to results that confirm our beliefs. To this end, we provide our clients, as necessary, with editorial, copy-writing and -editing help as well as marketing, positioning, graphical, , and strategic advice -- so much more than the mere "programming" at the foundation of web design (in which we also excel.)
I think [tolerance] sets the bar too low. I recognize that tolerance is progress over intolerance, but I believe a great democracy should have higher aspirations. Instead of tolerance, we should be calling boldly for the creation of brotherhood and sisterhood. Let us not merely accept our differences, but celebrate our kinship as sisters and brothers of the human family.
-- Coretta Scott King
The Internet has been lauded as a democratizing force, a tool to be put in the hands of everyone right 'round the planet, but as can readily be seen from the nightime view of the web of light above, this tool is unevenly available. It takes very little inquiry to see that many here at home are disenfranchised. It strikes us as a simple matter of noblesse oblige that we who have by chance been endowed with the ability to see these tools in the hands of those whose lives might be bettered by access the web's burgeoning trove of information should bend at least some of their talents to this task pro bono publico ...and this is the work that makes us proudest.
website gallery -- what we're working on... (scrolls to the right ... ... ...
If you like what you see at these sites, pleaselet us know.
We like to encourage technology transfer, and webstering still isn't exactly rocket science. For small businesses wanting up-to-date websites, nothing beats teaching someone in your business how to roll your own web pages -- provided there's native talent available. We have enjoyed striking success with our clients over the years, and so you may notice that some of the websites in our gallery are now being maintained by the clients themselves. We're prouder of these sites than anything else we've done.
