Aaron Gustafson
This is me
This is me, I work on the web.
I started working on the web back in 1996 when I wanted to build a website for the magazine I had started. I was still in college, but there were no courses on web design so I had to teach myself. I picked up a copy of Creating & Enhancing Netscape Web Pages from the bargain bin of my local Comp USA and started reading.
After graduating from New College in 1999, I took a job as one of the two people working on the online edition of the Bradenton Herald. That's right, I said two people. At the time, newspapers weren't doing much online and my job was to come in at 10 or 11PM and copy a few of the top stories over from the Quark layouts into our HTML files. Nothing was automated, there was no archiving, and Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG was pretty much what I lived in. Oh, and under the hood was pure tag soup. I can't take credit for it, but it's funny to look back on it.
In 2000, my fiance (now my wife), Kelly McCarthy, got into Yale Divinity School and we moved to Connecticut, where I began working as a freelancer for a bunch of companies, including Gartner and Deloitte & Touche. I began working in Homesite almost exclusively and was spending most of my time fixing broken table-based layouts some 30 to 40 tables deep. It was horrible, but I got really good at it.
Between 2001 and 2002, I worked on sites for a wide variety of companies—IBM, Delta Airlines, Aetna, and Scholastic to name a few—before settling into the team lead position in Cronin and Company's newly-formed "digital" department. While there, I created a great team and we did some fantastic work for clients including Konica Minolta, the Connecticut Lottery, the CT Dept. of Transportation, and Mystic Aquarium among others. It was there that I really began to focus on web standards-based development.
I left Cronin in 2006 to work on building my own web consultancy, Easy! Designs LLC.
Over the years, I've worn just about every hat you can on a web project: strategist, information architect, designer, developer, copywriter, etc. I've built numerous web applications, content management systems, e-commerce systems, surveying tools, and more websites than I can count using (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and Ruby on Rails. Honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way; I like variety.
Lately, I've been dividing my time between training web teams in CSS and JavaScript, producing XHTML, CSS & JavaScript for companies such as Adaptive Path and Happy Cog, and building websites for a growing list of companies and non-profits.
This is who I am... who are you?
Photo Credit: Cindy Li
This is me
This is me, I work on the web.
I started working on the web back in 1996 when I wanted to build a website for the magazine I had started. I was still in college, but there were no courses on web design so I had to teach myself. I picked up a copy of Creating & Enhancing Netscape Web Pages from the bargain bin of my local Comp USA and started reading.
After graduating from New College in 1999, I took a job as one of the two people working on the online edition of the Bradenton Herald. That's right, I said two people. At the time, newspapers weren't doing much online and my job was to come in at 10 or 11PM and copy a few of the top stories over from the Quark layouts into our HTML files. Nothing was automated, there was no archiving, and Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG was pretty much what I lived in. Oh, and under the hood was pure tag soup. I can't take credit for it, but it's funny to look back on it.
In 2000, my fiance (now my wife), Kelly McCarthy, got into Yale Divinity School and we moved to Connecticut, where I began working as a freelancer for a bunch of companies, including Gartner and Deloitte & Touche. I began working in Homesite almost exclusively and was spending most of my time fixing broken table-based layouts some 30 to 40 tables deep. It was horrible, but I got really good at it.
Between 2001 and 2002, I worked on sites for a wide variety of companies—IBM, Delta Airlines, Aetna, and Scholastic to name a few—before settling into the team lead position in Cronin and Company's newly-formed "digital" department. While there, I created a great team and we did some fantastic work for clients including Konica Minolta, the Connecticut Lottery, the CT Dept. of Transportation, and Mystic Aquarium among others. It was there that I really began to focus on web standards-based development.
I left Cronin in 2006 to work on building my own web consultancy, Easy! Designs LLC.
Over the years, I've worn just about every hat you can on a web project: strategist, information architect, designer, developer, copywriter, etc. I've built numerous web applications, content management systems, e-commerce systems, surveying tools, and more websites than I can count using (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and Ruby on Rails. Honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way; I like variety.
Lately, I've been dividing my time between training web teams in CSS and JavaScript, producing XHTML, CSS & JavaScript for companies such as Adaptive Path and Happy Cog, and building websites for a growing list of companies and non-profits.
This is who I am... who are you?
Photo Credit: Cindy Li