About

I was born in Cordova, Alaska, a small fly-in/boat-in town of 2500-3500 people depending on the season. At an early age, I had an ever-growing interest in anything web related which fairly quickly, accrued into a passion. Today, I have been immersed in web technologies for over 20 years, 12 of which have been in a professional environment. My focus has always been on clean, simple, highly effective web applications that fulfill three criteria. They must be effective, efficient, and bring satisfaction to the user.

Once graduating highschool, I moved down to Southern Oregon to continue my education in the Pacific Northwest and enjoy my other passion – the great outdoors. Here I attended Southern Oregon University where I received my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Information Systems and a Minor in Business Administration.

Now armed with a degree, it was time to put it to use! I began my career as a web designer/developer for a small web company called WebMastery, LLC. It was here that I was provided with the opportunity to develop projects starting as napkin scribbles to fully functional applications. This included skills such as wireframing, visual design, front-end template design, back-end programming, database design, search engine optimization, and hosting; I was able to do it all…a dream come true! Working here gave me a holistic understanding of how all parts of web development fall together. This was essential for many creative ideas to become a reality; knowing what was and was not possible.

The time came to move on and I started working as an HTML designer for Musician’s Friend, Inc., the largest online and catalog retailer for musical instruments in the world. At the time, we only supported 2 sites, Musician’s Friend and Giardinelli. Today we help support 5 ecommerce sites and 1 musician community site listed below.

Over the past 7 years I’ve moved from HTML Designer, to Web Designer, to Sr. Web Designer, to User Interface Design/Development Manager, to Director of User Experience. As Musician’s Friend grew over the years in size, so did the need to focus more on the customer. The enthusiasm for understanding why people do what they do was something that enabled me to build out a User Experience group, which continues to expand today.

I’ve had the opportunity over the years to work with several of the most popular and well known 3rd party software packages. Many of which are ATG, JIVE, Certona, Cleverset, Omniture, Offermatica, BizRate, ForeSee Results, Unica, Google Analytics, FireClick, SilverPOP, ResponSys, iProspect, Endeca, TeaLeaf, Heiler, Akamai, Loyalty Labs, QAS Address Verificdation, RightNow Technologies, Translations.com, UserTesting.com, CrazyEgg, and many others.

In September of 2006 I started my own web development company on the side called Ridgeline Media specializing in site template design and development, search engine optimization, and user experience website evaluation. Web properties were developed using Ruby on Rails as it provided an extremely rapid development cycle resulting in quick turn and fit my needs for simple, clean solutions.

All in all, I love web technologies and the outdoors. If I get those, I’m a happy man!