About

Conrad Walton

I’ve been designing, developing, and building web sites for businesses, both large and small, since 1994.

Conrad Walton Headshot

The Internet was just a legend to us back then, a place for academics and government workers. My wife gave me the “Internet Starter Kit” for Christmas in 1992. I sent my first email that day and my life was changed forever. I soon learned about FTP and Gopher and MOOs. When the web came along in about 1993, I learned HTML. My first web host gave us 200k of space on the server. Yes, that’s “k”, not “MB”. I serve images bigger than that now.

I put my own web server on line on June 24, 1994 and it’s been on line ever since, except for that time that the hard drive quit while I was out of town for a week in 1997, but that’s another story. I’ve been designing, building, and hosting web sites ever since.

I got a “day job” as a web developer for Vivendi Universal Games, a video game company in 1998. We built promotional sites for the games we sold. I learned about marketing from that job. They hired developers that we a lot better than I was, but I turned out to be better at project management. I’ve been a project manager ever since, working with technical people, creative people and managers. I learned what it took and how to make things happen on the web.

When Vivendi laid off 40% of the company in one day, including all of my department, I started to work for Intermix, the company that created MySpace and sold it to FOX. I worked on other sites for them, including some pretty spammy, sleazy sites, I’m sorry about that. I learned how to work with an online community, with email lists, and the finer points of advertising. I learned the right way and the wrong way to do things.

I worked for FOX for a while, before they started to reorganize everything and all of the people I worked with left for greener pastures. I went to work for ePublishing, who does high end (read: “unneccesarily expensive”) sites for publishing companies. The clients are people who had old school print news companies and were desperately trying to make the switch to online. I learned how to deal with difficult clients and unreasonable decisions. We cranked out some great sites in spite of it all.

In the meantime, back when I was starting out in 1994, I built a site for a friend who owned a company so that I could say that I had built a companies web site. I got the domain name “survivor.com” for that site. When the TV show hit in 2000, my poor little servers didn’t stand a chance under all of the traffic. I learned about buying web hosting.

When I learned about SEO and AdSense, about 4 or 5 years ago, I started to optimize the site. It was on the third or fourth page for search results and I was making about $1200 a month. All that traffic was from people typing in “survivor.com”, thinking that was the official site.

I actually bought an eBook about “making your millions on line with AdSense”. It cost $75. I was afraid to buy it, but after I read it, I started started doing the things in the book, trying various changes to improve the search results ranking as well as the click through rates. I soon got on the first page of the search results and I started making $2500 a month. After the first year of working on it, I was making $3500+ a month. Interest in the show has since waned, but I made $35,000 in one year, all from AdSense at a dime or so a click .

Now, I write about how to put your small business on the web, and market it effectively for free or really cheap. By “small business”, I mean five people or less. Car repair shops, restaurants, contractors, wedding flowers, or real estate agents.

While I can do everything it takes to get your site on line, I’m best at coaching you on how to get it done yourself. I want to give you the knowledge and power to get the best deal on the most effective web site that you possibly can. I know the tricks and the tips on how to get it the way you want and get it for not very much money. You can hire me or read my site. I’ll be here for you. Thanks for spending your time here.

Victoria Walton

My wife, Victoria, is the designer. She got a BA in Fine Arts, hoping to be a fine artist. She found a job with a large corporation, doing proposals for military and aerospace projects, which paid the bills, but didn’t exactly feed the soul. After 16 years working there, working her way up to being a manager of a large group of artists, she left to pursue what she really wanted to do. She’s attended Otis Design School and loves to create whenever she can.

When I needed someone to help me design web sites, she learned the tools to do that and applied her innate artistic skills to the technical world of web development. I still do some design myself, but no site leaves our shop without her creative direction. Anything that you see in our portfolio that makes you think “Wow. That looks cool.” is all her design. Since she wasn’t trained as a “web designer”, but as a “fine artist”, her designs will be a bit different than what you might find on other sites.

-conrad walton