imagination>I am my business
I am a small business for small businesses and I am an artist and writer.
My background is as varied as my interests - a degree in Social Work, a family run business I grew up with, my late blossoming interest in art making, my life long love of writing. Later in life I added desk top publishing and web design. All these parts complement one another.
What’s different about my business service?
I’m a one person company.
I offer personalized service – I often combine the services of a virtual assistant with the web design/implementation and the book designing process frequently involves a feedback process with the author.
I started out by making websites on assignment for school, then for my family: my sister, a sport psychologist; my brother, a fly fishing guide and bamboo rod maker. This led to other work, the most complicated of them belonging to Rocky Mountain Play Therapy Institute. Through this work I learned to do better and more complicated work involving emailable forms, flash slideshows, PayPal integration, css coding etc. The print element came with the design work - mainly simple magazine ads, newsletters etc. but my book design skills were sharpened by three annual poetry collections followed by the non-fiction “Riding Out of Your Mind” book. I also co-edit/publish and design the semiannual Toward the Light: Journal of Reflective Word and Image
A simple concept: I offer basic website design and construction. What does that mean?
Look around the web and you'll see many different styles of websites. What you don't usually see is all the code behind them which in the right combination gives you a website. To view most code is a simple matter. Go up to the top of your browser and click on "view" then "page source" or click on "page" then "view source" - it's different on different browsers. What you'll see when you do the clicks is usually a long page of code with words like header, body, html, div, font family, css etc. with a lot of symbols like <> and = and " " and { }. It all has to do with "hyper text mark up language", the language of the internet. Put the words and symbols in the right order and you have a functioning website. Miss a symbol or word and things go missing or fly out of control.
There are different ways to build a website, some are more complicated than others - just look at the difference between this site and something like www.cbc.ca. The CBC site has to be up to date 24/7 and has pages to do with all aspects of CBC radio and television. It also references regions, time zones etc. A one person design service could not create and maintain a site like this and I wouldn't try to. However I can create multi-page sites such as I did for Rocky Mountain Play Therapy Institute in Calgary.
inevitable fire print.web design evolved out of my quest to authentically express who I was as a business as well as my explorations in various creative spaces and media. It is my business to interact with, and strengthen, your expression - to help small businesses, artists and other creatives recognize and express who and what they are and to assist them in establishing a presence in print and on the World Wide Web
My passion is expression – to explore its many variations, all the languages of word and image I might communicate with – and the sharing of this experience and knowledge.
Deb Clay