About the web design business Hard Web

Hello welcome, my name is David Thatcher.

I have been a website designer on the Gold Coast since 1999 when I began my own business initially called WEBEL WEBEL.
I have lived around the Surfers and Broadbeach areas since 1964.

It's all about ME!, oh and YOU! too

I was influenced in my younger days by the punkrock ethic which was about expressing yourself by doing it yourself.
My form of expression came with screenprinting t-shirts beginningwith surf and ski labels then rock bands like DEVO, the Sex Pistols,Stiff Little Fingers, TISM etc. etc. I must have printed close to onehundred different T-shirts for myself and friends over the years andI loved doing it and wearing the T-shirts, maybe with a bit of a twistedmessage designed to shock.

The web came along and I was really excited by it's ability to reacha potentially huge audience (but it doesn't matter if it is only yourcircle of friends) with whatever you had to say to them! I thoughtthe biggest potential was with personal homepages (check mine here whichwas first published in May 1998) whereby everyone would get in on itand have their own webpage to do with their personal lives and interestsin much the same way that a T-shirt can "position you" in regard to repelling some people and attracting others.

Well... I think that has come to fruition finally with facebook and blogging butin general I believe I was wrong and the commercial aspect of the webis what has really taken off and people see it as too much troubleto learn HTML and maintain their own webspace.

But, I have taught HTML to quite a few clients and the onesthat pick it up and learn how to update their own webpage get a lotmore out of the web, I believe. So there! Now on to the (mostly) boringbit....

Yaaawwn

I had an early start in Computer Science with a school subject in Grade11 (1980 Yowee). We learnt Hardware and Software which is sort ofinteresting in that I know what and, nand, or and nor gates are aswell as the IF...THEN,ELSE and the unforgettable GOTO statementsare...

10 X=1
20 IF X=2 GOTO 60
30 PRINT "Go and get GOTOOED"
40 X=X+1
50 GOTO 20
60 END

Anyway we learnt BASIC (Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic InstructionCode) and PASCAL (No Acronym - just a French Mathematician) which arenow known as first generation Computer languages. We also learnt technicalstuff like bits, bytes and Hexadecimal strings also those pesky gates.
We also dreamt of things like Bubble memory and used a Digital PDP-10and cards and a card reader which are alas the computing methods ofa bygone era. I went on to the University of Queensland and did morecomputing (in a Commerce degree) and picked up a few more languagesFORTRAN and COBOL which stand for FORmula TRANslation and somethingbeginning with C and ending with Language.
We also learnt Structured Programming and M.I.S methodologies, soundsbetter if you say it slow... m e t h o d o l o g y, see Grandma I gotan OLOGY! (Just don't ask me what it means).
About here I seem to remember hitting the wall, I mean Accounting,Finance and Computers are O.K if you're really into that sort of analyticalstuff, but they can get a little boring.

Ifinished the course with six subjects from as many faculties, Anthropology,English, History, Philosophy et al.
Finally some life!
I saw programming as sitting at a computer screen and well...PROGRAMMING!and baby that was not for me.
Graphics were in their infancy (Space Invaders, Pong) and the GraphicalUser Interface (GUI) just wasn't important.
It was a matter of manipulating data whether it was the TAB (big ComputerScience Graduate employees back then), an airline, motels, govt, bigcompanies or whoever.
To cut to the chase I became interested again about 15 years ago whengraphic programmes and animation were getting better. Photoshop isa great programme and I felt an urgent need to learn it and that wasthe start of my web interest.
I always tell people HTML (Web programming language stands for HyperTextMarkup Language) is easy to learn and so is publishing web pages andthat is true, but programmes like Photoshop, Freehand, Illustratorand CorelDraw (the last three are all vector based drawing programmesand quite similar) take a lot of time to learn properly and then thereare the yearly upgrades...what I mean is to be a complete web designeryou need programming skills as well as graphics skills and althoughin the future I am sure they will be separate fields at the momentweb designers need a lot of different skills.

My graphic experience started with screenprinting T-shirts whichI did professionally for two years and was followed up with coursesin Cartooning, Animation and Graphic Design followed by a one yearCertificate in Arts - Printmaking 1996 in which I specialised in Screenprintingand Computer Art.

The web came up at the right time for me consolidating a whole lotof interests and skills I already had and it has finally made computersfun to work with.

In the web design/programming field and I am adept at programmingin HTML/XHTML and using CSS (style sheets), I can program JavaScript and can write my own PHP for form processing but to code an entire PHP/MySQL database driven website would take me too long.
If a client wanted it I would pick something off the shelf and customize it for them.
For graphics I use Photoshop CS2 and for web designI use Dreamweaver CS3.

There are a lot of other programs that I have used i.e. Freehand but I wouldn't say I was an expertuser which I am with the programs I have mentioned which I use everyday.

Thanks for listening!

Contact Hardweb - making websites work!

www.hardweb.com.au

07 5526 2939
0401 352 269

Home/Office Address
-- 25 Savoy Drive --
Broadbeach Waters
Gold Coast Queensland 4218