Welcome to the new digs…
January 10th, 2010
If your reading this your one of the first few people to visit this site. Thanks for stopping by, I really appreciate it! I know it’s not much to look at right now but I’ll be working on the site regularly and once I get it all set up and I start learning the ropes of blogging (writing mostly) I think I can make this site interesting and worthwhile. This post is gonna be kinda long and all over the place. It has a lot of background and stories in it. I’ll probably end up editing and breaking some of it out to other pages on the site but if you have a little time to kill, do check it out in it’s current form!
I first got into web development when I was still an undergrad at The Ohio State University (Go Bucks! @}-`–). I was going to make a website for my dad’s computer store, Computer Bay. The store was in the somewhat selective Apple Specialist program (back in the days before Apple Stores). I remember my dad bringing home an original Macintosh and I played shuffle puck cafe, stunt copter, and some crazy game with robots. It had text to speech, which seemed so far ahead of its time. My dad always made sure I had some new or interesting electronics to play with. Crazy side note – my day’s birthday is January 24, the same day the Macintosh was introduced.
Back to the website… I designed mock ups and plans for the site but my dad ended up selling the store to OWC before I got very far with it. Another crazy side note – the guy who started OWC actually used to come in to the store when he was a teenager. It was the right time for my dad to sell. Traditional computer stores started dying when the big box retailers like Best Buy began stocking computer equipment and our suppliers like Apple started competing with us at the retail level. OWC innovated by getting into the ISP game early and marketing their own products like external hard drives and cpu upgrades.
After getting ready to make a site for my dad’s computer store and having it falling through, I decided to try and make a website for someone else. I convinced my roommate to join on, he taught himself how to code and I handled the creative and business side of things. We got lucky because it didn’t take long to find someone was looking for a new website. We took it on even though neither of us had ever made a website before. It took us a few months but it actually turned out pretty well, you can check it out here. It’s about the same as it was when we put it up back in 2003. The check had four digits and as a college student that went a long way. We always talked about finding new clients but between classes and extracurricular pursuits nothing much came of it.
My other roommate was playing a lot of online poker at the time. I played some but really took an interest in the affiliate programs the poker sites were offering. I set up affiliate programs and got a wholesale hook up on poker chips (something like $22 for 500 11.5 Gram Clay Poker Chip Set in a nice aluminum case) and offered them free to my affiliate sign ups. The best programs were paying $150 a sign up or 20-50% revenue for life. I got into the market late and I knew it so I took the quick cash but the guys who got in early and opted for percentage commisions must have made insane money.
The poker affiliate business went well for a year or so, then we graduated and my roommate and I went our seperate ways. I started promoting clubs and bars in Columbus – I basically got paid to party, hard. I played around with some DJ & Audio Production stuff but I didn’t do much with web development for the year or two I was promoting.
Fast forward to June 2009. One of my good friends got a job at a web hosting company and convinced me to get back into web development. Up until this point I never developed a site by myself. I started reading up and by the end of June I had Refined Pixel up. I posted ads on craigslist and started getting projects. It’s still exciting when people fill out the form on the site, those people are usually pretty interested in doing business. I got swamped by November and cut back on the craigslist ads. I’m wrapping up a few projects right now and taking the extra time to work on some personal projects I’ve had on the back burner for a long time – like this site.
One Response to “Welcome to the new digs…”
1Katie
January 13th, 2010 @ 1:06 am
L O V E it! Now I am getting so pumped for my site and what is going to be in your ‘LAB’ section.
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