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 punk rock ethic which was about expressing yourself by doing it yourself.
My form of expression came with screenprinting t-shirts beginning with surf and ski labels then rock bands like DEVO, the Sex Pistols, Stiff Little Fingers, TISM etc. etc. I must have printed close to one hundred different T-shirts for myself and friends over the years and I loved doing it and wearing the T-shirts, maybe with a bit of a twisted message designed to shock.

The web came along and I was really excited by it's ability to reach a potentially huge audience (but it doesn't matter if it is only your circle of friends) with whatever you had to say to them! I thought the biggest potential was with personal homepages (check mine here which was first published in May 1998) whereby everyone would get in on it and have their own webpage to do with their personal lives and interests in 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 but in general I believe I was wrong and the commercial aspect of the web is what has really taken off and people see it as too much trouble to learn HTML and maintain their own webspace.

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

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 of interesting in that I know what and, nand, or and nor gates are as well as the IF...THEN,ELSE and the unforgettable GOTO statements are...

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 Instructio nCode) and PASCAL (No Acronym - just a French Mathematician) which are now known as first generation Computer languages. We also learnt technical stuff like bits, bytes and hexadecimal strings also those pesky gates.
We also dreamt of things like bubble memory and used a Digital PDP-10 and cards and a card reader which are alas the computing methods of a bygone era. I went on to the University of Queensland and did more computing (in a Commerce degree) and picked up a few more language sFORTRAN and COBOL which stand for FORmula TRANslation and something beginning with C and ending with Language.
We also learnt Structured Programming and M.I.S methodologies, sounds better if you say it slow... m e t h o d o l o g y, see Grandma I got an 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 thing, but they can get a little boring.

I finished 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 Graphical User Interface (GUI) just wasn't important.
It was a matter of manipulating data whether it was the TAB (big Computer Science Graduate employees back then), airlines, motels, govt, big companies or whoever.
To cut to the chase I became interested again about 15 years ago when graphic programmes and animation were getting better. Photoshop isa great programme and I felt an urgent need to learn it and that was the start of my web interest.
I always tell people HTML (Web programming language stands for Hyper Text Markup Language) is easy to learn and so is publishing web pages and that is true, but programmes like Photoshop, Freehand, Illustrator and Corel Draw (the last three are all vector based drawing programmes and quite similar) take a lot of time to learn properly and then there are the yearly upgrades...what I mean is to be a complete web designer you need programming skills as well as graphics skills and although in the future I am sure they will be separate fields at the moment web designers need a lot of different skills.

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

The web came up at the right time for me and the job of being a web designer consolidated a whole lot of interests and skills I already had and it has finally made computers fun to work with.

In the web design/programming field I am adept at programming in 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 CS5 and for web design I use Dreamweaver CS5.

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

Thanks for listening!

Streaming Video

As reward for staying the distance, here is a video of our cats, Jimmy (the dancer) and Akira (the watcher).
This video is hosted on my own server and was created by Flowplayer a freeware video player which makes it easy to "embed" and "stream" your own video without resorting to using Youtube or Vimeo.

This video has no sound but you can click to see two more video examples that have sound.

There are more details on that page about how I offer a self-hosted streaming video solution which can be embedded on your own website.

See two more self-hosted streaming videos this time with with sound.

If you want video on your website then make the video and contact me to embed it on your website!

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