Boutique web design when the web was young

The first decade of my professional career was focused on building skills, learning about business, and maturing from a Flash designer to a developer, and laying foundations for User Experience and Customer Experience:

Pixel Praise quickly rose as one of the premier Joomla (open-source) CMS web development firms. As a partner, I developed the business plan, forecasts, ran sales, and developed sites. I introduced 1-2 week Design Sprints well before such things were commonplace. We pivoted from customer development to online templates, extensions and plugins, including a theme site (JoomlaPraise), a mobile site (TapTheme), site administrator application (AdminPraise), and full-blown project management software suite (ProjectFork).

As the entire planet moved to eCommerce and Social Media sites, at Capstone we specialized in online stores and communities for local businesses in Austin, Texas. I cut my programming teeth on open-source platforms such as Interchange (Perl-based e-commerce) and Mambo (PHP-based CMS, later become Joomla).

While still in college we began selling custom Flash (yes Flash) website in Lafayette, Louisiana. Remember, this was a time when first you had to convince a company WHY they needed a web presence at all.

Ran an online template club as well as an open source project management software company, and operated a boutique web app design service breaking ground in the SMB industry in Austin, TX.