- Karel Goetghebeur #2 - June 22, 2020
- Karel Goetghebeur #1 - June 15, 2020
- Adolphe Sax #2 - June 8, 2020
Okay, how I started as a web developer? It’s a unique story as well, not as long as the other stories. I don’t remember exactly when the internet was born, but I was born before it!
I was playing music and acting at that point, and I’ll just get right to it. My friend Dan was a computer wizard and a piano player. I mean, he still is a great computer guy. Dan had quite the keyboard set up. It was a blues band and a hip hop/rap band all-in-one. The blues version of the group was called “Roll With It,” and the rap version of the band was called “Red E,” so we were Red E to Roll With It! Sometimes we would do a concert as the blues band and sometimes as a rap band. There were times when we would have gigs with both groups on the same bill and would change our clothes between the sets. FUN!
I was the blues singer, and rapper the other group. It was a great band we were ahead of our time.
So Dan was and still is a computer whiz, and he showed me something on a website that changed my life. This was in the early days of the Internet. The infamous “right-click” on any website, you can still do this on any website, and you can see the code behind the site. Now, this is in the early days of the Internet when it was primarily HTML, so it was straightforward to understand. He explained to me what that meant, and it was simple. It’s not as simple these days because today, the Internet is controlled by content management systems, and CMS is database-driven, but that wasn’t the case then. It was what you get WYSIWYG! He explained a lot about how the Internet and web sites work. I was just intrigued by the whole thing.
After that, every website I went to I would right-click and I would see how it was built and then I went and bought some books about it. I went to the bookstore I went to the library and found some books on HTML and he would show me a few other things. I started designing websites on my own by myself just riding HTML and I loved it! And I said to myself “I really need to take this seriously” so I went to Boston University and started to study. I studied HTML, CSS JavaScript, PHP, and Photoshop. I then started to get into Content Management Systems. It was Joomla first which is also a content management system that I was first introduced before WordPress.
Once I saw the power of the CMS it was a wow moment. I found WordPress and then I found Drupal and Photoshop and everything else. I’m sort of obsessed with it and the Internet and started developing websites. WordPress has a third of the websites on the internet.
I am proud to say that I designed Charlie Parker’s official website that the estate used from 2017-2019. The estate has since moved on and hired the great Jeff Jampol to manage its business, and Jampol subsequently changed the site. But I am very proud to say I did the design for Bird’s website as the Charlie Parker Estate transitioned to work with Jampol and his agency.
I work with my good friend Sarah Mendelsohn, who is also a fantastic drummer and singer/songwriter, and we developed a small boutique company called Levitate Web Solutions, to display our portfolio. I’ve been on the internet since the internet was born.
