If you care to read
I’m a self made man. I’m a DIY guy to the core. I’m a professional musician and a graphic/web designer. I also teach and develop online classes for webdesign and eCommerce.
Through trial and error, I’ve taught myself how to do everything I love in life from web design, graphics, playing drums, playing music, running a band and small business, learning new software, learning to kiteboard, windsurf, snowboard, and so on. I’ve had no formal education or instruction of any kind. I learned how to harness my pure drive and motivation to learn what excites me and direct that energy toward making a living at it. If you’re not excited about what you do for a living, it’s going to be a rough ride through life.
I’ve been doing websites since 1994 when Netscape Navigator hit the scene. I’m sure some of you reading this have no clue what the hell Netscape Naivgator is, and that’s OK. We’re in a much better place now.
Back in the day the way you marketed your band was to hang flyers, pass out cassette tapes of your home demos, make hat pins, DIY t-shirts and play out as much as you could. If you were smart maybe you even collected names and addresses of fans and sent them post card mailer of your shows. Stamps cost about .20 a pop so you had to have $$ to do a simple mailer. Times were tough. The post card or mailer would reach it’s recipient and then was typically slapped up on the refrigerator and glanced at from time to time. “What’s going on this weekend honey? Oh The Cheap Dates are playing at Club Soda, lets go down for a visit”.
So along came the internet. This shit was next level. All of a sudden I could put up my bands concert calendar, bio, and even market our new cassette demo with my custom J card artwork that I had been slaving over in the basement for days. I called a few ISP’s and inquired what it would cost to have them do our website. They wanted $2,000.00. You’re out of your mind I told them and went to Barnes and Noble.
I was forced out of pure driving motivation to learn how to do this website stuff. I bought a book called “Learn to build a website in a week”. I had to teach myself how to write code and learn how to use Paint Shop pro, a new affordable graphics program that came out because I couldn’t afford the Gucci Adobe Photoshop 3.0.
It was a slow ride to the finish , but I gobbled it up and loved the process. I launched my first website in 1995 to promote this great reggae band I had been asked to perform with. There it was in all it’s slow loading clunky glory. It was out there for the world to see.
I’m so glad things have changed.
I don’t want you to even come close to what I had to go thru to get a website up. Let me help you.