Yeah sure, I’m 5’8”, 27 years old and I know better than to mix business with leather. Actually, though, I’m just a person trying to make the world a better place for my part. I’m a vegetarian, don’t own a car and try to recycle, so maybe that will make a difference. I also love Pittsburgh more and more every day that I find a new little secret in one of its neighborhoods.

Well, I really like not having to have a car. The east end has a great variety of neighborhoods and things to do, and the busses currently do a pretty good job of getting you around between them. Hopefully that remains true through the Port Authority cuts… I also like the coffee shops here, particularly Crazy Mocha and their free WiFi – I can just sit down there, grab a coffee and work all day, and even though I’m a one man show, I still feel like there’s a buzz or an energetic vibe going on.

Well there are a lot of sites made in Dreamweaver or something similar, where the people making them are just clicking buttons and don’t understand how the code works. You can’t build a really excellent site that way, you need to be typing the code out by hand, being fully aware of what you’re doing, where you’re putting what, just really getting into the layout and functionality of it all. Which is the way I do it, and so I guess I like to think of the sites I make as being thoughtfully handmade rather than pumped out by the WYSIWYG factory.

Hmmm. Well, working with giant brands like that, there is limited input on your part, they just give you a brand standards/corporate identity book and tell you what they want the site to do and you put it all together. It’s really more “website assembly” in my mind, rather than web design or development. I was really happy to get big clients like that and don’t get me wrong, it’s great to work on something that may be seen by people all over the world, but I’m really more focused on small businesses and small Pittsburgh businesses in particular now. I like knowing that I’m a huge part of their business’ success, at least on the Web. In my ideal world I’d barter everything – make a website for my barber and get free hair cuts, trade a CMS for a years worth of groceries at Whole Foods, etc. etc.

Recently I’ve noticed that just throwing an idea passed my girlfriend (she’s also a Web designer) or one of the developers I work with, they’ll have some great ideas for the design itself that I just wasn’t able to see from my perspective. But I don’t know that I have any odd habits particularly.

As a side story, I used to work for a TV station and the producers there would always tell me that you need to “Give it a star wipe” which basically meant that for every project they did, they’d add this really awful transition effect in somewhere that was basically a star shape that cut from one scene to the next. They knew it was awful, but they also knew that management would want to have some type of input, just to feel validated or whatever, so they would always come back and say “It’s perfect, but let’s lose the star wipe.” I found that funny, in a sarcastic pecking-order psychology type of way.

Neither is particularly more important. No one in Pittsburgh seems to care about accessibility, or even web standards. In fact, today I went through the top results for web designers Pittsburgh pa and only two of those, including myself?, weren’t built using tables for layout. That’s just a serious shame that companies are out there building sites that are completely off Web Standards and they’re making it work. We’re still in the stone age of Web design, I guess though, so maybe that will change over time. But as far as accessibility goes, I definitely feel that it’s as important as the design or the stability of the code, but there are some pretty crazy requirements for meeting AA and AAA accessibility as they’ve been defined, and sometimes the technology or budget just isn’t there.