About
Wufoo
As of June 2010, I am now at Wufoo (woo-hoo!). Wufoo is an online form building service that I have been using as a web designer for years because it makes the otherwise daunting task of building forms easy. I was, in a way, already an evangelist for them as I’d recommend them to anybody asking me about or for help with forms.
Wufoo is a small company (now 9), but that still makes it three times the size of Chatman Design. Like everyone there, I’ll probably be wearing a lot of hats: designer, blogger / social media dude, customer support, evangelist, etc.
Chatman Design
In May 2007, I got my first “real job” as a web designer at a small design agency, Chatman Design, in Madison, Wisconsin. They were losing their “web guy” in the middle of some pending projects, so despite having no professional web experience at all, I got the job. I was the new “web guy”, quite literally.
Andrew Frigo rocking a sweet wig. Tim Chatman slugging a brew.
I had to go in head-first, as they were already hosting and maintaining two important eCommerce sites and working on a third even more ambitious project. It was a trial-by-fire. In the first year we were able to fully redesign both the eCommerce sites, launch the third, redesign our own site (a few times) and do a couple of other web projects as well.
I’m still the “web guy” at Chatman Design, and we’ve been knocking out projects right and left. My favorite part about the job is that I get to be involved and see projects throughout their entire lifespan. I am there for the very first client interactions, to research and goal defining, to designing mockups, to building out and launching the site, and then all the way to keeping the site up and maintaining it for years and years.
The CSS-Tricks Story
In July 2007, I was learning so much so quickly about web design at Chatman Design I got the idea to start writing about what I was learning on a blog. And thus the birth of CSS-Tricks. It was actually a whole family of sites at first, including ones for each of the major Adobe applications. This quickly proved far too ambitious and I trimmed down to only the site that really appealed to me, the one focusing on web design.
In August 2007, I wrote up a tutorial on how to “fade out” the bottom of a web page. Despite it having some major shortcomings (it didn’t work in IE 6 and it would make links unclickable in the fading region) it was picked up a ton of other sites and I got my first taste of popularity. It got me excited and I quickly redesigned the site and kept writing tutorials. By Mid-2008, CSS-Tricks had grown into quite a thriving community between the blog, forums, and video screencasts.
In Mid-2009, I added a Snippets section (bits of useful code without long drawn out explainations), which was born from the same idea the blog was: a repository of information just as useful for me as for the world.
Building Out More Sites
In 2008 I launched Script & Style – a collaboration with David Walsh. At the time, we were both interested in adding social news components to our site so we thought we would combine forces. The idea is not unique, a link repository for articles on web design and development, but the execution is. Even though Script & Style is a middle man between the interested audience and content, we try and keep it as light weight as possible, offering direct links to content wherever we can, even through third party sites that syndicate S&S links.
I also launched a web app named Status – with my long-time friend Richard Felix Jr.. The idea was in many ways “Twitter with Groups, for Business”. It was a fun project but didn’t gather much steam and we ultimately decided to shut it down and focus efforts elsewhere.
Part of that refocusing was Are My Sites Up, another project I’ve done with Richard, which we launched in early 2009. A simple (on the outside anyway) web application to keep an eye on websites and send warnings (email, SMS, iPhone “push”, or Twitter DM) if they go down (and when they come back up). It is based on the freemium model, where we have a limited-but-still-useful free plan with lots more features as incentive to upgrade to a paid plan. The service has been popular beyond my expectations and continues to grow.
The Big Book Idea
Jeff Starr approached me in late 2008 about writing a book. We quickly both settled on WordPress and away we went. It took about year and was released in November 2009. The book (and quite loaded blog!) live at our Digging Into WordPress site. As of June 2010, WordPress 3 is now out, and we will begin the process of updating the book to that version.
Interviews
I’ve been lucky enough to have been interviewed a number of times. Here is a list of them.