About The Author

I’m Jim Smith, author of  “How to Start a Home-Based Web Design Business”.

A Little Bio About Me

I have been a web designer for around 20 years (since 1993). You can view my web design business website at www.blarneystone.com. I grew up in Florida and went to University of South Florida in Tampa. In my younger years I was a hotel and restaurant chef. I opened restaurants in Little Rock, AR, Muncie, IN, and Hartford, CT and methodically tracked the inventory and accounts through various computer systems. It was during this time that I started to discover I liked figuring things out using a computer. The techie side of me started emerging just as the Internet was coming into use.

I closed my last restaurant in Hartford in 1993 and started tinkering with this new-fangled thing called the Internet. To pay the bills, I was working for a major insurance company in their training department. One of my jobs was to go to various facilities and give live demonstrations on what the Internet was and to try to convince the executives and support staff that this unfamiliar thing was here to stay.

I was also running my own web design business on the side and, like many other web designers I’ve met since, I got downsized out of my corporate job and set up my own web design business out of my house.

Why I Wrote The Book

As I stumbled my way through designing websites and learning the business end of it, I longed for a “how-to” book to give me some tips and suggestions as I grew my business. Since there was no such book for web designers, when I was approached by Globe-Pequot Press about writing a book, I jumped at the idea. Mind you, I had never written a book before. I knew nothing about book writing. But it didn’t seem to matter to the publisher — they prefered someone who had been in the business for a while to share ideas.

What I’m Doing Now

I have fellow web designers contact me to ask if I’m still in the business and whether I still think it is a good idea to be a web designer. Yes and Yes! I enjoy designing web sites and plan on doing it for as long as I’m able (and as long as it is feasible). I created this web site to share ideas with other web designers. If you contact me with a question, it is very likely that if I think others will benefit from the answer I give you, I’ll probably try to find time to turn it into an article here. I’ve got some Google ads to hopefully help offset the cost of maintaining this but primarily, I do this website both to give back and because I enjoy it. I hope as you become more successful in your web business you find a way to give back to the community that satisfies you as much as this does for me! Enjoy it.