Since 2006 I moved away from the city I lived in for twenty years, I left my comfortable job as the New Media Developer of a marketing agency, I married, bought a house, and I estimate that I have worked on up to forty websites – but I never worked on my own website.

You know what they say; there’s always something wrong with the mechanics car. I was fine not having a site as I was so busy working on paying client sites. I could only put it off for so long however. 

In addition to my May 1st website launch contest with Pixel Flex there are many reasons to have an online presence - and it’s the same reasons I tell my clients:

• It shows you’re relevant and current
• You need to meet your target audiences expectations
• It’s an investment in SEO for when you need it

BasicallyI need to take my own medicine. 

It’s been a long time coming, so I hope you enjoy it. I will be making journal posts regularly, newsletters every month or two for the time being, and launching a portfolio in the coming months. It’s exciting work – I love making the time to work on my own brand.

Yes, as a web designer and developer it is incredibly ironic that I don’t have a proper site. I have rationalized it in several ways:

• I’m too busy with paying work
• I’ve never needed to advertise at all, why start now?
• I love irony

At the same time my colleague, long time friend, and business rival Tim Lum has an equally un-website for his studio PixelFlex.

Tim and I have a friendly competitiveness going on (despite the fact that we routinely subcontract to each other), so we have decided to take part in this years CSS Reboot. Essentially we are going to completely overhaul debutcreative.com and pixelflex.com respectively and launch Alpha on May 1st 2009. At the same time we are going to release “before” shots of our sites as they are before the reboot, along with some site traffic / popularity statistics.

After one year (May 1st, 2010) we are going to compare numbers again. Whichever studio site comes out on top in terms of popularity, wins! The losing studio will then donate time to the charity of the winners choice. We’ll have more details a little closer to the date.

This is a friendly and competitive way for Tim and I to pit our SEO and marketing wits against one another while hopefully finishing the sites that we may otherwise never make the time for.