In the winter of 1999 I bought a copy of HTML Goodies by Joe Burns at a local Barnes & Noble at the recommendation of the geekiest-seeming (and therefore most trustworthy) employee at the store. I built my first website that weekend—an homage to Tyler, my family’s harlequin great dane. Just a few months later, I launched a dog trainer’s website for $250 complete with animated gifs, table-based layout, images sliced in Paint Shop Pro and HTML written in Notepad. My first web job—I was proud.
These were the old days. There was no such thing as a case of DIV-itis. JavaScript hadn’t yet gone out of (and back in) style. DHTML was cutting edge. I was about to buy books on JAVA and VBScript and later regret it. I had never heard the term usability. Google had a very ugly logo.
Nobody I knew really got the web or its potential then.
But I had a vision. I tried to build a golf directory for South Carolina even though I hated golf. It was going to list all the courses in the area and let users play a “virtual round” complete with a JavaScript animation of a guy swinging a club overlaid on photos of the course similar to a golf video game. But the site never got off the ground. I was too young and inexperienced to sell it.
That summer I moved back to Maine to live the adventurous live of a schooner deckhand. In 2001, I resumed coursework at Clemson University to study architecture. I fell in love with literature and philosophy during my first year. I left architecture school because I wanted a more rounded education. While I never studied anything directly related to web design, I found some very inspiring people at Clemson and finally graduated with degrees in philosophy and German, having lived in Germany for a year.
The web wasn’t really a part of my life at school, but I kept up with changes in (X)HTML, learned CSS and picked up some small web and graphic design jobs for beer money.
When you see a fork in the road, take it
I like words. On graduation day I wanted to be a journalist. I packed up for tiny Cashiers, North Carolina to be the summer intern at the Crossroads Chronicle, a weekly local newspaper with a circulation of about 3,000. Cashiers is a very small town (I photographed the installation of the town’s second traffic light). There wasn’t a lot to do for a recent college grad. I like to be outside, and I spent most of my free time hiking and waterfall watching.
GoCashiers.com was born in September 2006, a guide and directory to the area. Exploring as much as I was, I had taken a ton of photos. There wasn’t much good information about Cashiers on the web, so it made sense to fill that niche. I turned down the job offer at the Chronicle to focus on GoCashiers, which made some money selling annual directory listings to local businesses.
September was the wrong time to start a tourist-driven business in a summer town, so I moved back to Charleston that winter without a plan except to build a similar site for the South Carolina Lowcountry.
I changed gears with the upcoming 2008 elections, I tried to build a social network for politics called PoliCosmos. I picked up PHP/MySQL in the process. Needless, to say, the site didn’t really get anywhere. I did one freelance job that I was lucky to have.
Detour
I took a year-long detour doing high-end decorative painting, working mostly with oil glazes and finishing some unbelievably beautiful properties in downtown Charleston, Nashville, and—surprisingly enough—Cashiers, NC. I learned how to hold a paint brush, to paint faux wood grain and marble, and painted the “Yoohoo glaze”—a blurred glaze that looks like a fog of color giving flat walls the illusion of depth—over and over which was surprisingly satisfying.
I continued building websites on the side for fun. I don’t think people normally see the artistic side of building the web, but it was an art to me and I was dabbling. LowcountrySurf.com, VenusPoetry.com and some other sites that flopped or never finished—see, CongressCageMatch.com, SixMillionDollarMap.com—were born during this period.
The Redneck Riviera
The aching backs and noxious chemicals of painting drove me back to the web for good. I answered a craigslist ad and landed my first “serious” job as a front-end web developer for a company based in Myrtle Beach. I would work in Charleston with two other employees at a satellite office on King St.
I initially stuck my neck out to see if I was hireable. But working there gave me a crash course in the industry. Right away, I enjoyed being engaged with the field despite spending most of my time on real estate, resort and hotel websites. Early on, I traveled to New Orleans to attend Jeffery Zeldman’s A Conference Apart. That weekend sealed my fate as a web developer.
Like an iron worker on the first skyscrapers I was going to be one of the creators pushing this new medium further, building it by hand, keystroke after keystroke.
But the business side reared its ugly head. The C’s at this 30-some employee company (CEO, COO, CIO, etc.) didn’t share my idealism and legitimately cared more about profit than beautiful websites and web standards. It became more than clear that my job was to be an HTML machine, not to think, not to contribute ideas.
But ideas I had! Working with experienced web developers, I learned so much about the field. I learned web standards. I learned jQuery. I learned MVC. More importantly, I learned which blogs to read so I could keep on learning when…
I quit my job and started freelancing again.
The blog I was building at seanmccambridge.com became my flagship, my first mistake. I picked up some subcontracting gigs with big corporations, my second mistake.
By this time I was enamored with the 37signals way of doing business. My plan was and is to build a product that becomes its own business. I built a fledgling ChucktownDeals.com—a site currently laboring in an identity crisis. I redesigned GoCashiers.com (and tripled traffic just by improving the design!) selling a few new listings.
Freelancing is going very well. It took me about a year to figure out what makes a good freelancer. It’s all about making the client happy. Duh, right?
Well, I’m losing my steam writing this story so I won’t get into too much detail about what I’m doing now. The interesting part to me is always how people found their way to where they are. You can usually figure out what someone is doing, but knowing the right turns, wrong turns, speed bumps and roadblocks along the way is like knowing the exciting details of an epic journey.
Comments
No comments yet.
I appreciate your feedback. Comments are moderated. Email is required but won't be printed. Include your website if you have one.