A Little About Me

My name is Steve Adams. I have a BSEE engineering degeree and I worked for 20 years in Silicon Valley designing computer hardware and software. I hold two patents, one in hardware and one in software. I live now in Oakdale, CA and offer personalized web development for businesses in the Oakdale, Riverbank, and Modesto area.

I have a good eye for graphics, excellent writing skills, and my engineering background gives me unusual strength in advanced web technologies. And I love to develope web sites!

Your business or your practice deserve a professional looking web site that reflects the dedication and energy you put into it. I'll work with you one-on-one to create the best site we can, that says what you want it to say and does what you want it to do. Then I'll host and maintain the site for you.

Have you lost control of your web site?

This happens frequently. You find out, for example, that the company with such a great price shipped the work to India, where a team stamped it out with a Content Management System (CMS). Now those people are gone and you can't find anyone who understands that CMS: your site is frozen.

You can also lose control when your friend, who put up your site for little or nothing, takes a new job and has no time now to make the changes you want. Or they drift out of your life, taking your site knowledge with them.

I will personally do your web site. Living here in the Oakdale, I can always meet with you personally to chat about your site. I can usually make that small change you want immediately.

If you have a site you've lost control of, let me bring it up to what you want it to be, adding, for example, all those pictures you've been collecting and giving it a more professional look. We can do as little or as much as you like, or do a little each month. I will then host and maintain the site for a minimal cost. My basic rate is $50/hour - but I do a lot in an hour.

My friend said she would do my site for only $500

It seems that everyone has a friend, relative, daughter of a friend, etc. who took a class in HTML and thinks they can do your web site. This rarely ends well. Projects that a professional would finish in a couple of weeks creep on for months with no end in sight and no graceful exit for you or your friend because you're, well, friends.

Building a web site looks easy but every way you turn is another wall of detail to manage, and the field keeps growing. To do this well you have to enjoy getting lost in books full of technical detail. (I love it!) A night class in HTML/CSS doesn't take you very far. Consider that the smartest people on the planet have poured 160 IQs into this stuff for 20 years. It's a long climb to get onto their shoulders, no matter how smart you are.

To build a custom page that works and looks better than other professional pages out there today you must be comfortable working with many technologies. To make the pages interactive you need to work in JavaScript and jQuery.

For quick, dynamic exchanges of data with the server, rather than making users wait for entire pages to reload, you need Ajax.

To customize your pages on the fly for different users (as Amazon does, for example) you need to write code that runs runs at the server that hosts the site, using a language like PHP. To collect and hold transaction data you need to set up and manage a MySQL database.

You don't want to reinvent any wheels while you build your web site, if you can help it, so you need to know what software modules are already available and how to integrate them into your site.

You need to use something like Dreamweaver, of course, to create and upload your pages to a server, but you also need to be at home with software like Fireworks, for graphics; Firebug, for debugging; Google Analytics, to view and understand the traffic coming to your site; Google AdWords, to plan and manage a pay-per-click advertising campaign; Pay Pal Pro, to set up eCommerce . . . .

If you want to use video on your site you should understand how to use a good video editor like Premier Pro. For animation you need Flash or SwishMAX, which each has their own language, "ActionScript."

Nothing here is trivial. What looks at first like putting up a shelf in the garage can quickly become more like rebuilding your Lexus transmission.

And then there's site maintenance. Will your friend commit to hosting and maintaining your site, indefinietly? How many times can you ask for more changes when you paid so little, or nothing? And be assured, web sites do and should change - often. As you learn how people react to your site, you think of better ways to say things, new things to say, new images to post, new video to post . . . . Web sites are never finished as long as you keep thinking up new ways to improve your business.

The risk in letting your friend do your web site is that you'll end up with a site that you don't like and that you can't change, and you'll lose your friend.

Your web site is the finial atop years of work building up your business and your reputation. You're better off with no web site than one that undoes that work by being amateurish, awkward to use, annoying, or just out of date. It takes years to build a solid reputation and only one mistake to destroy it.

My Strengths
Some Recent Web Work

"We are extremely happy with the online menu Steve’s Web Shop created for our restaurant. Our customers tell us they love ordering from it. We highly recommend Steve and his work. He is professional and a pleasure to work with."
Monica and Jim Davis, Cottonwood Café Oakdale, CA www.cottonwoodonline.com

"We’re very happy with the medical web site Steve’s Web Shop put up for us. We gave Steve the basic concept for what we wanted and he was able to implement this beyond our expectations in a short time. In addition, Steve's writing skills helped us to express our message in a clear and professional way. Steve was very easy and enjoyable to work with. We highly recommend Steve and his work."
Hung Bui, Central Valley PET Imaging Center Manteca, CA. www.centralvalleypet.com

"I am constantly amazed by what Steve, at Steve’s Web Shop, is able to do on the web. Steve’s abilities seem endless and the quality and thoroughness of his work have been worth much more to me than what he charges. Steve is also teaching me web design and his lessons are so interesting and informative that I’ve encouraged him to put them into a book. Steve has been a godsend for my business. I highly recommend him."
Erik Quisling, entrepreneur, author and musician Oakdale, CA www.buyabarcode.com , www.upayahouse.com

Steve's Web Shop

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