Jared Lui

I've designed and developed sites for almost 19 years now. In that time I have had several full time jobs working for various software companies in roles as tech support, document writing, and graphics and GUI design. But I've kept coming back to the one thing I really enjoy doing which is working from my home office designing and developing websites.

I would not call myself an expert as the field is so broad and ever changing and I don't think anyone that is any good could find the time to keep up with the technologies and still have time to practice the art. However I would consider myself a professional as I think what I do create is both purposeful and masterful.

Through the years I have followed the same tried and true methods and bent with the will of the internet enough to give my clients and websites years of knowledge and insight that can't be taught in school. There is a lot more that goes into making a good website than code. When word of mouth gives you more than you can handle work wise, you know that you're doing something right.

Some history:
In 1989 I bought my first computer at a swap meet. It was a beat up Amiga 1000 and wanted it to play games on. I was soon hooked on computers and soon traded it and had two Amiga 500's. Loving the graphic capabilities I bought one of the first Amiga 3000 Towers to come out and an OpalVision graphics board. I later upgraded to a 4000 Video Toaster. I soon became proficient at creating logos and graphics for friends and co-workers.

However, circumstances changed and I had to switch gears from playing with cool graphics and games on the Amiga and buy a more practical PC and become an office jockey for several years.

I joined several bulletin boards in the early 1990's and was asked to help create graphics for a website that a company was gearing up to launch. From that point I was hooked.

I started building websites as a hobby in 1994 on a then state of the art Packard Bell PC with a full 60 MHz Pentium chip, 340MB hard drive, 8MB of RAM (later upgraded to 16MB) and a sizzling new 14,400 baud modem, newly upgraded from a 9,600 baud.

Prior to the great SPW (service provider war) of 94-95, you remember the emailed discs, I built my first website using Notepad and using Mosaic (later Netscape Navigator) to transfer my files. I did my time with Prodigy and CompuServe and then finally AOL. Then AOL Press came out. What? Software that will help me writes HTML for me? I used AOL Press to help create my first commercially and paid website. I soon was asked to join a small group of designers to help create a new hosting and design company. I pretty much only consulted, created the graphics and moderated the forum. The forum is where I learned about all kinds of new software and the latest tricks and techniques and was soon using cool new toys like HoTMetaL, HotDog, Adobe PageMill and Cute FTP.
I started using MS Front Page 1.1 and had a love/hate relationship with it and found myself going back and forth between it and HotDog until early 1998 when I became a beta tester for Macromedia on their first version of Dreamweaver. I've used every version of Dreamweaver since including CS6. I have had a love/hate relationship with Adobe since they acquired Dreamweaver but for the most part still love working with Dreamweaver but that is probably due to the existence of extensions like WebAssists.
I've designed hundreds of websites through the years from the one page scroll forever sites at the beginning to completely Flash driven websites and everything from adult pay sites to massive corporate and ecommerce sites. I don't really count the numerous WordPress and Joomla sites I've done through the years as building a website but yes I have done many of those too.
Currently:
I work full time from my home office in Fort Worth Texas though I do travel from time to time to meet with clients as needed. I build my own gaming computers as they are way more powerful than a store bought system for half the price of a good off the shelf computer. It helps to have a Fry's Electronics nearby. I primarily use Dreamweaver CS5.5 in code view for 95% of my work, using Notepad for the rest. I use split-view often to quickly find myself in the correct area of code. I create most of my designs in Photoshop or Fireworks then slice images and create CSS and Grids to layout my designs. I work with a lot of dynamic websites so use the full arsenal of WebAssist extensions to help make life easier and save valuable time. I use Php/MySQL, JavaScript, AJAX, JQuery, CSS3 and HTML5 to create all of my sites. I do all of my testing on my live Dedicated server rather than a local machine so that I see the end result at the beginning which also saves time down the line when it comes time to going live.

I am happily married to a business professional that is both smart and beautiful and most importantly puts up with me. I have two wonderful teenage daughters, one of which will be going off to college th