Experience

Experience

I started using the Web in 1993 (yes, the bad old Mosaic days) and I built my first web site in 1995.

Web Content

I have been writing web content professionally since early 1999, when I wrote, designed, and built an entire site for an environmental monitoring company, using GoLive. I maintained and expanded the site for the client until early 2000.

For several months in 2000 I worked as a web copywriter in the PR department at Enron. I reorganized a 700-page intranet site, managed and provided information architecture for several small web projects, and wrote or edited hundreds of HTML pages, using Wordpad and DreamWeaver.

I also wrote and built dozens of pages of media analysis of newspapers in Central and South America, the Caribbean, the Near East, and South Asia for use by media liaison and management of Enron subsidiaries operating in those countries.

In 2001 I wrote, designed, and maintained an HTML-based intranet site for a server operations group at ExxonMobil to help streamline their operations. Twenty-five people used the site to coordinate their work (round the clock at four locations). Only the NT Server Operations group had access to site, so sensitive information could be stored and accessed without security risk.

In 2002 I consulted on web content and wrote web copy for several companies, including Bowden Systems (software), Texas School of Bartending, and an online IT employment site.

In early 2007 I started my own company and began building commercial web sites and blogs for myself and for clients.

In 2008 I wrote and designed a web site for a West African drumming teacher. The site immediately achieved number 1 listing in Google searches for its keywords and continues to help bring in new business from all over the country.

Since then I have build dozens more websites for various clients.

Blogging and Blog-Building

Writing niche blogs on various topics in a variety of writing styles is good practice. It is good business. It is also fun.

I like the easy maintenance and flexibility of the WordPress engine, so I use it to manage various kinds of content. While I still have a couple of Blogger sites that I started out with, the rest of my blog sites are self-hosted WordPress sites that I have built myself. To save time, I use readymade themes, but I customize them—sometimes heavily—for my purposes.

I have worked with Joomla but did not much care for its relative inflexibility.

Search Engine Optimization

I began working with search engine optimization in 1999 while building and maintaining a site for a corporate client. I continued to study it for the benefit of my other clients’ sites and my own sites.

In 2006 the Houston Chronicle’s Online Products department hired me to analyze housing community web sites for Newland Homes and to do a detailed search engine optimization (SEO) analysis of the sites. To accomplish that task, I had to invent an SEO program for the Online Products group.

I studied the Newland web sites and those of their competitors. Then I designed SEO analysis forms and checklists. I analyzed their sites page by page and created a table of SEO problems and suggested remedies for each page.

Then I wrote a 120-page report, including comparative analysis of competing web sites. I wrote and produced a 1-hour PowerPoint presentation summarizing the report.

That experience has proven valuable in creating and optimizing sites for clients and for myself, but I continue to study SEO constantly. As the search engines change their ranking methods, I improve my SEO strategies.

Content Management

Working with corporate clients such as BP, ChevronTexaco, EDS, ExxonMobil, Schlumberger and SYSCO, as well as a host of smaller companies, I learn and use whatever content management systems and databases they use.

For large corporate web and intranet projects, I have worked closely with Lotus Notes programmers and with developers on other database engines, both commercial and proprietary.

I have designed, built, and administered SharePoint sites since 2004 for companies such as SYSCO (foods), EDS (IT consulting), Kaneb (pipelines), and BP (energy). I often build or reorganize SharePoint document libraries for clients.

I build, back up and maintain MySQL databases for my WordPress sites. For small projects WordPress makes a fine light-duty content management system.