where it began
bjturk.communications started out mostly as a hobby, with the intended purpose of developing my own web presence after first subscribing to america online in 1995 (i left aol after about a year and a half). from there, the concept that became bjturk.communications grew as i began to write things of my own, and then began designing web presences for others. from the beginning, my goal was to design attractive sites that did not need — and often should not have — the very latest, high-tech, high-dollar, high-download-time doodads that everyone seemed to like but no user wants to wait to see.

i found that creating such sites was not difficult, and that they could be just as effective, if not more so, than the endless sources of frustration that populate the web in the guise of being the latest and greatest thing. since i originally connected to the internet via a dial-up connection, i was sensitive to the users' desire for sites to download and display quickly. i knew that i lost interest while waiting for some bloated sites to download, and i often clicked off when i simply hadn't the patience to wait for the latest and greatest thing. this was particularly true of those sites who were using technology so new that i would have to wait (again!) to first download a plug-in to see this technological marvel. no thanks.



my first client (other than myself, of course) was saint germain great danes, a breeder of fawn and brindle great dane dogs in apache junction, arizona, which is east of phoenix. as i developed that site, i recognized that it would graphically-intensive due to the number of photographs of the dogs that would appear. i spent more time researching the technologies that would keep the download times low while maintaining a visually interesting site. it wasn't easy, but i pulled it off. i have since received a number of compliments on it.

as the client and i put that site together, i found that the content development process moved along better when i wrote the initial copy and submitted it to the client for review, providing a baseline from which to work. it was a process discovery that i have retained to speed development, though i am more than willing to plug in copy that has already been written, reviewed and approved. however, this is rarely the case. saint germain great danes continues to be a site to which i am most proud to have attached my name, and the client has become a very good friend as well.



next came marco steel & aluminum, with locations in midland, texas and albuquerque, new mexico. truthfully, i felt sorry for marco steel. they had received one of these faxes that promised a web site free if they would agree to host with the company for a year. they went for it, and received the saddest web site that i'd ever seen. it was more than merely bad. it had no visual appeal, it lacked content, it didn't have links where it should have had them (such as on email addresses), it wasn't intuitive to navigate its few pages, and it just looked unprofessional. actually, it wasn't as good as i'm making it seem. it was worse.

on my own, i designed a new site for them that looked much nicer, was easier to use, downloaded relatively quickly, and made them look better as a company. i have held onto the materials from their original site to remind me of how bad a design can be, and it serves as a motivator to keep me from ever allowing one of my designs to so poorly represent me. someday, i'll might put them up side-by-side so people can see how well i overhauled their site, but i fear that some people might think that i created the original too!



today bjturk.communications has a small stable of clients, maintains all of their sites, and provides hosting services for two of them. it isn't that i don't want more business, but i am happy with the kind of clients that i have. i am proud to be associated with them, and i want them to feel the same way about me. the personal touch makes a difference to them and to me, and i am happy to provide a level of service that they probably can't get anywhere else.

i prefer to see each client as a friend. working toward the same goal, a satisfactory web presence, my clients and i achieve solid results in a relatively short time frame. i am easy to work with and i never forget that i work for my clients and not the other way around. a web site is a reflection of the client's business much more so than mine, so i am always sensitive to how the site presents the client's firm.

if it is this frame of mind that your company needs in developing a web presence, i'm here to help. click here to contact me about a site of your own.

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