Full transparency – a walk down memory lane

I’ve had a long journey in the web industry, it’s started in 1997 when I met my husband, he bought a used computer from the paper; we immediately had a deep connection for the capabilities of what that computer could do. It would bring us to computer shows where we’d walk aisles upon aisles of computer vendors selling odd wires and circuit boards, external hardware such as mouse devices and all kinds of laser pointers, as well as discounted software. A year into having the computer we built our first website themalldot.com it was the first virtual mall before AMAZON, can you imagine… It got third place on ZDTV an internet show and we won a web cam, hey this was a big deal it was 1998. It was our first notion that we were on the right career path.

In the beginning I would get teaching jobs, and teach basic computer skills (how to use a mouse, oh yeah there were people who didn’t know)… Microsoft Word & Excel, to Basic HTML, & Adobe Dreamweaver and Macromedia Flash. I still miss MACROMEDIA’s Flash. He did too, he would build apps before they were a thing. He build application to edit his kid’s MySpace pages, he wanted his kids to learn HTML; years later I always wanted him to improve his application to be an html and css editor. I still see so much potential in it, it was a solid program that earned a licensing deal with THQ. His program: MySpaceLayoutTool was sold in OfficeMax, Staples – yes we bought 2 copies, again another validation we were on the right path.

He was summoned back to manufacturing boats, and left me keeping this boat afloat until he could come back to captain the ship for the final years of Web Media fx. I was very happy taking on gigs, projects and clients that could use my knowledge and expertise in online. In 2004, we were scrambling to make a memorable Christmas, we pulled a few all nighters and built Hampton’s Bride. It was a virtual wedding magazine the first of it’s kind. We had snow falling from the pages on the designer’s bridal fashions. We lit Christmas trees on the pages of the flip book. You entered feeling like it was Christmas; we landed Kleinfeld’s Bridal Boutique in New York as one of our first advertisers. What started out as a way to make a little extra Christmas money became America’s Bride magazine – a monthly digital magazine with two supplemental issues – our Wedding cake magazine if I still had it today would still be popular, from that we meet some of the most amazing wedding cake designers such as, Sylvia Weinstock, Ron Ben Isreal; he would guest write from time to time.We were able to obtain the drawings of Princess Diana’s wedding dress from the designer herself. I got to interview Vera Wang. — Then came the burnout and the ever changing market, I couldn’t keep up. It was meant to be a seasonal 2 dresses, 1 cake, 1 honeymoon issues became 12 issues a year, chasing down advertising.

Times changed online marketing and advertising changed. It became more about the clicks then anything. It’s going through changes again… It’s no longer about clicks, people saw that there wasn’t much value in the numbers. They wanted to believe in the numbers but … the numbers didn’t align with the monetary value.

It’s interesting how the life cycle has changed over the years going from the computer, to the laptop to basically majority being on their devices.

It’s a change that I’ve still working through the processes. I still have some learning to do. But that’s OK, I’m a good student. I try and lie to myself all the time, saying I can’t learn new things, but that’s just laziness because I can learn – I just don’t want to focus long enough to do so.