Early on in my career, we produced artwork for printing by pasting down anything from strike-on copy, rub-down letters or phototype onto an artboard, which was then photographed on a large camera for further print processing. We used to joke that anyone who owned a t-square and some sort of rectangular table considered themselves a designer.

In the 80s and 90s along came Pagemaker, Microsoft Publisher and Corel. Anyone who owned that software claimed the title of being a "designer."

Now, we have the web ... and you can see this coming. Anyone with a computer and a rudimentary web program now considers themselves a web designer.

It isn't that easy.

Good web design, and I'm not talking about web sites that cost tens of thousands of dollars ... just simple sites to help people conduct business ... requires a skills set that includes a strong design sense, experience in business and a technical ability to develop a fundamentally sound web site, including knowing enough about HTML and CSS to have a site that functions properly.

The sites I design, including this one, do what they're supposed to do.

This site was developed using an open-source (free) application called Joomla. I like using software like Joomla because there are thousands of developers world-wide who create and sell basic templates for next to nothing. Then someone like myself spends hours modifying and tweaking so that it does what we want it to do. What's really cool are many of the add-ins and plug-ins that are available which can make a web site sing.

The web sites I have developed for restaurants are only a sampling of my web site gallery, but represent the type of web design I do. Of course, I've done some fancier work for other businesses, too, but the price becomes a little fancier as well.