Web Design Blog by James Honts |
Hello, I'm originally from the Quad City area, but moved to San Jose, CA. after college. It was the mid 90s and the .com boom was really gaining momentum. Since there were no real schools or degrees for web design, it was a motley crue of graphic designers, computer science majors, business majors and a lot of hacks, all vying for the new high paying web design positions. Fortunately, I joined a web design guild based in Berkeley, CA. The web guild was a great organization. The design guild was a great way of discovering new technologies and networking with others in the web design field. It was also a great way to land my first consulting job. I've not been able to find a professional web design guild yet in the Quad City Area, but I'll get to that in my next entry. After finishing my initial web consulting gig with Novel, I already had several corporate job offers in the wings. The best offer was from 3Com. I had actually heard of 3Com before and they had 3 nice big buildings, so accepting the job was a no brainer. After the 6 month web design contract was up, it was time to move on. Doing simple HTML and Photoshop edits was ok and 3Com was great, but I'd heard of this thing called JAVA and wanted to expand. That's how I found myself in this small building interviewing for some company called Cisco. I had never heard of them or had any idea what they did. Shortly afterwards, I found out Cisco was a huge company,(I know you already knew that), and they offered this great thing called stock options. Long story short, that 3 month contract turned into 6 years. After 10 years of California, I really wanted to get back to Davenport. That's how Honts Designs came to be. Until 2008 I was under contract with 2 companies. Those two contracts took all the web design time I could handle :-). Since 2008, I've found myself doing freelance web design, internet application development and internet marketing. Fortunately, that keeps me pretty busy. Of course, I'm always looking for that next big internet project. Well that's it for my initial post. Come back soon for my next article. I plan on proposing a professional web design guild in the Quad Cities. Email me if you have any comments, etc.
James Honts, |
