Team – Tom Hanlon

A majority of my professional life I spent in academia—both as a student and as a teacher. It was a profession I enjoyed. I had to make a change, however. Like many in the education field, I found the financial challenges were too great. Without realizing it, the research skills that I developed there have been indispensable in my work with the web. Who knew?

One day my brother came to me with a proposal. He needed help with his website projects, so he asked me to work for him. Without any formal education in this field, I decided to re–educate myself in web design and development. The process worked just like learning in any new language: it meant immersing myself completely in it.

My primary concern is content because I believe that content should influence every aspect of a web project.

Buzzwords seem to crop up monthly about this kind of web development and web–content work: digital curator, content strategist. Both of those words much more accurately describe what I do than the lame acronym that proceeded them: SEO (search engine optimization).

Even though I like the above mentioned titles better than SEO, whenever someone asks me I what I do, I make a more concrete analogy. I compare my work to what the editor of a newspaper does. (Everyone should be able to understand that for analogy for a couple of more years). Simply put, I research, write, and organize content for website projects. Depending on the project, my writing responsibilities will vary.

Writing HTML and CSS code by hand obviously adds a few more responsibilities to my job description; however, I know that without my knowledge and experience writing web code, my editorial work on web-projects would not be nearly as effective as it is. - TH

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