My next project was the formation of Pleiades Publishing Services with my business partner. After the initial enthusiasm over in-house and desktop publishing subsided, many companies realized their corporate communications now looked un-professional, because their staff had the tools to do publishing, but not the design knowledge to make it look good. Pleiades was a design agency that helped both with staff training and the actual design and production of more critical pieces.
Initial clients included US WEST, Bureau of Land Management, US Geological Survey (USGS), NCR, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Coor Brewing Company and a host of small and medium sized businesses, with work dedicated to print publication design with a specialty in the visual information design of highly technical data. This included a mathematical and technical book published by CRC Press.
Starting in 1994 our clients expressed interest in the internet. Our first major online project was for BLM where we converted the printed publications we designed and illustrated into a 2,500 page website between 1994 to 1996.
At Coors Brewing Company I worked under contract with Vice President of New Product Development Ed LeMieux. There I produced both technical and competitive research reports with visual information design for graphical presentations. In addition I worked with the IT department at Coors to produce an intranet specifically for the New Products Division.
In 1995 they opened Coors Field in Denver, and New Products Division showcased the Sandlot microbrewery at the stadium. To commemorate the opening, Coors produced 1,995 custom signature baseballs. Ed gifted me with baseball Serial Number 1.
In 1996 we began a multi-year contract with Refinery Terminal Fire Company in Corpus Christi, TX. There I helped construct the datacenter operations. In that same year RTFC launched their Training Academy which provided classroom and live-fire training for firefighters in refineries and chemical plants from around the world. I built the Firefighter Training Database to maintain training logs, certifications, and instructor reviews for every trainee at the Academy.
At RTFC Headquarters I built the database and publishing system to enter the technical data of the different response hazards at the refineries and chemical plants that RTFC protected, and developed the visual information design for the RTFC Emergency Response Pre-plans that were printed from the database.
I also designed and developed the joint website for RTFC and the Fire Training Academy.
Over the next several years, interest in web design replaced print design as the dominant client request.
My first e-commerce site was for a funded startup during the .com era in 1999. Internet commerce was still quite new, so when Digital Camera Company requested an e-commerce site for a full line of digital cameras and camcorders, with multiple images of each camera, product reviews, side-by-side comparisons and a help facility for decision making, there was no software on the market that would fill their need. This project involved almost a year of custom coding to create. Unfortunately the venture lost its funding before the site ever launched.
One of my largest projects at the time was with Kare Products, an ergonomic furniture company in Bolder, Colorado. Kare Products had a Macintosh network with FileMaker Pro Server hosting their product database internally. From 2000-2004 I modified and programmed the database to assemble product names, descriptions, detailed specifications, images, related products and cross-sell information, and to serve the constructed catalog pages to our remote e-commerce web server running a Lasso interface. The system also included an integrated Ergo-Fit system which allowed the user to set a variety of parameters to help identify specific products and options to fit their needs.
Throughout this project I worked with their design agency to convert the design Photoshop PSDs into website templates and implement the dynamic page generation from the Filemaker database.
In June of 2004 I accepted an extended contact for series of special projects from one of our oldest and best clients. I was tasked with designing, and installing the Information Infrastructure – network, servers, storage, personal computers, communications, and cyber-security – for Industrial Emergency Services to improve operations and communication between their Corpus Christi Headquarters and their Baton Rouge field office. The next year this expanded to their facilities on the refinery island of Equatorial Guinea.
Operating in the dual role of Chief Information Officer and Chief Security Officer, I designed and developed the specialized software and databases to manage, disseminate and protect all the proprietary information about the petro-chemicals at the facilities they protected. This period was only three years following 9/11, so security requirements were significant.
Printed materials, HR documents, hazardous material processes, and other information was converted to be accessible online for both officers and firefighters. In addition, under the direction of the Chief and Training Officer we published the IES firefighter recruit training standards.
During that same deployment, I was dispatched to Louisiana for Hurricane Katrina. Louisiana Power & Light announced to the refineries and chemical plants that they were taking their power plants offline, consequently, all the plants would have to shut down as well.
All the critical information our firefighters relied on, including the contents of every tank, storage vessel, and processing unit, the Materials Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) for those contents, the required Personal Protective Equipment and firefighting pre-plans, accidental spill or release dispersion modeling software, and the related evacuation plans were in each of the data centers of the plants and refineries that were turning off their power.
In less that 24 hours we set up an emergency data center, transferred all the necessary data, and I installed, configured and operated the HGSYSTEM and HYSPLIT chemical dispersion modeling software for area evacuations in the event of tank ruptures and spills during the storm and for the rescue deployments following.
In 2007 my long-term contract with IES ended, and I was considering what I wanted to do, and the direction I wanted to take my company. I had relocated my business from Denver to Austin, since by this time nearly all my clients were in Texas.
I gave serious consideration to dropping website design and development. Handcoded HTML was a nightmare, and the automated tools of the day, such as Adobe’s Golive, lacked database connectivity to make them useful for larger sites. A new acquaintance, Chris Sherrod, suggested I try something called “WordPress”. I was dubious.
I had tried lots of software tools. It seems if you are in the computer industry you have to learn two or three new programs or techniques every year. Most don’t live up to the hype, often adding more work than they solve. WordPress was different.
Admittedly I screwed up my first site. Because I didn’t understand how themes and plugins worked, and documentation was very scant, I got my site to do exactly what I wanted by re-writing WordPress core. The next revision of WordPress obliterated my code. I sought help, and found it in the form of the Austin WordPress Meetup and its organizer, Pat Ramsey.
Over the next couple of years I built my skills in WordPress. When Pat mentioned he needed help with the Meetup in 2010, my partner Sandi and I became co-organizers. In January of 2012 Pat stepped down to focus on his business. Sandi and I have now grown the Austin WordPress Meetup to the forth largest WordPress Meetup in the world, and the single most active – with a meeting every week, including on focussed on WooCommerce.