Tuesday, January 6, 2009

The Beginning

After almost 40 years in the computer industry, first as a programmer (now they are called software engineers) and advancing to various management positions (in hardware, software and systems development), I was faced with the decision of what to do with the rest of my life. Or, stated differently, what do I want to do when I grow up?

In 1996, I was assigned as a Department Manager in a product development group where I had responsibility for people (skills development and assignments) and as technical interface to our marketing group. It became obvious that the use of the company Intranet could be a valuable assist for me to execute all of my responsibilities. I started to learn how to develop web pages that I then used to provide current organizational and technical information easily accessible by everyone throughout the company. After the closing of that project, I became a Resource Manager in a hardware engineering organization. Again I continued to learn and leverage the Intranet to assist in providing easily accessible organizational information as well as an online New Hire Orientation program.

During the last ten years with the company, my work of Intranet development to support my primary job assignments gave me a much satisfaction and a great sense of accomplishment. Additionally, many in the company, at all levels, acknowledged the quality and usefulness of the work I was doing using the Intranet. Other groups would request linking to my work and even a couple used me as a consultant to help them develop their own Intranet websites.

So, given the satisfaction I derived from developing web pages and websites, I decided that perhaps I could leverage my somewhat limited skills and resources to help others, that is small business and organizations, to capitalize on the Internet to foster their products and services. Thus, APT Web Design was born.