About

I put my first web site up way back in 1995.  It was a for a medical device company, and I was finding the embedded systems work boring – so I used to go hang out with the IT guys, Michael and Dave.  Back then, getting on the web was very different than it was today.  I had to explain to people what email was!  Scary stuff.  It didn’t take long for the project to be taken over by the marketing team, who basically said “Make it look like the brochures look.”

But, even then, we knew what strategy meant.  Getting on the web was about more than just doing it so you could say you did it.  Our web site was focused on the investors (after all this was a $50k medical device, it’s not like people were breaking out the Visa card to buy 3 of them).   Over time it because a customer / technical support portal.

I’ve worked in the web full time since then.  Mostly in financial markets, where as I like to explain to people I was one of the guys who makes sure that when you click the “buy 100 shares of this stock” button, that you actually end up with 100 shares of stock in your account.

I’ve also worked in travel, education, and a number of other industries.  Always the same pattern –  I’m a behind the scenes guy, working on the underlying architecture of the web sites.  That’s actually what it says on my business cards, “web architect.”

What I do not do, and never have, is build web sites for people.  I can sit with you and have a lengthy conversation about building web sites, and I can tell you what to do and how to do it and why.  I do that frequently for anybody that will ask.  But at some point somebody needs to make some business specific decisions – how do *you* want *your* web site to look, and I was just never good at treating people like clients.  I don’t like to make decisions for people.  I like to educate people about their options, and provide my opinion, and then let them use their judgement to make the best decision for them.

Recently I decided to start recording these conversations, because I was having them more and more often.  I’d regularly talk it out with a friend of mine (who I also got on the web), and comment on how I knew I needed to write this stuff down, but I couldn’t just do it in the vacuum of “Write down everything you know.”  He suggested starting a blog on the subject.  And so, Before You Launch was born.  I hope to set up an environment where business people who are thinking about getting on the web can find answers to their questions, and those who are already on the web can learn about what they should have asked in the first place.