I've been involved with the Web since the mid-1990s, when I was the new-technology columnist for the website of the late and much-missed MacUser, the magazine for which I was then Executive Editor. From that humble beginning, my involvement with the Web expanded to include stints with three major Web efforts.

PRODUCTOPIA

In December of 1998 I became Vice President/Editorial and employee #4 of Productopia, a product-reviews site that rode the early Web bubble to the tune of $17 million in venture-capital funding and - at its peak - 85 employees in mid-2000.

Productopia provided product recommendations for products in over 500 categories - "from nail polish to nail guns," as we would joke - and as editorial director I managed all the product evaluation, writing, and presentation. I was also involved in securing the initial venture funding and designing the site's editorial system; I also hired, trained, and managed a 20-person editorial team.

Productopia was named to Forbes’ “Best of the Web,” PC Magazine’s “Top 100 Web Sites” and Time’s “25 Best E-commerce Sites,” and had cobranding relationships with over two dozen major Web properties, including AOL and Yahoo. Our destination site alone saw well over five-million page views per month, with a page-per-visit average of between four and five.

The day after Productopia flamed out in Q3 2000, I received a recruitment call from the president of the computing division of Imagine Publishing (now Future US), which led me to create and manage the website for the American edition of...

T3

Imagine published the American edition of T3, the British "gear, girls, and gadgets" magazine. Although Imagine did, at that time, have a division dedicated to website development, that group was mired in procedural paralysis. T3 needed a website immediately, and to not be forced to wait through months of time-consuming multi-party decision cycles.

To accomplish this, I simply created the T3 website myself using Dreamweaver (as I did this site, as well), and had the site up and running in days rather than months. I continued to manage and improve the site, including adding daily news updates, feature articles, contests, and more. This success was short-lived, however, due to Imagine's "Great Dying" in February of 2001, when T3 was one of the many magazine/website entities that were closed when the company was reduced from 435 to 110 employees one Monday morning.

Although I was a victim of those layoffs, I returned to Imagine in June of 2001 as editor in chief of MacAddict (see this website's Editorial Leadership section for details of that effort), where I remained until MacAddict morphed into Mac|Life with its February 2007 issue. In preparation for that change I had redefined my role in late 2006 to become Media Producer of the new...

MACLIFE.COM

To streamline the development of websites for its multiple magazine properties, the Future US (as Imagine has renamed itself) Internet Operations group decided to standardize all the sites on a flexible Drupal-based format with a minimum of basic page types. MacLife.com was the "guinea pig" for this effort - the first Future US site to be built this way.

Working with a third-party graphic-design house (HZDG) and the Internet Operations group, I managed the navigation design and build-out of MacLife.com, including the development and implementation of a detailed site map. I then handled the transition to MacLife.com of 150 product reviews previously published on MacAddict.com, including creating all necessary article art. I also developed online templates for a variety of other article types, populating MacLife.com with enough additional content to enable it to present a rich experience to site visitors when it went live on January 9, 2007, almost immediately doubling the traffic of its forebear, MacAddict.com.

I managed MacLife.com until I left Future US in July of 2007, developing and posting daily content with the cooperation of the Mac|Life editorial team, and adding new features to the site. Improvements included the six-gigabyte Software Vault, for which I obtained permission from hundreds of software publishers to distribute their demos, shareware, and freeware; a Community Bloggers program in which I solicited and published product-usage advice from various Mac journalists, paying them based on the page views of their individual contributions; plus other site additions such as a Tip of the Day series, Editor's Blogs, contests, and more.

I also wrote a series of aricles on topics as diverse as sports photography and recipe websites, and managed - and in many cases produced - both video and audio podcasts, as described below (click on the subheads below for examples). A touch of trivia: The theme music for MacLife.com's podcasts is the opening of "Fugitive Man," recorded by my long-retired ska band, The Stingers, back in the late 1970s - that's me on bass.

The video podcasts I produced for MacLife.com were of two basic types: tutorials called "screencasts," which I created using real-time screen-capture software, and more-standard video interviews and news stories. In each case, I made the videos available both to be watched on MacLife.com or downloaded in either high-resolution QuickTime files or files optimized for both the iPod and the Apple TV.

I managed and hosted a weekly audio podcast series for MacLife.com called Mac|Live. These included discussions of the news of the week with Mac|Life editors, plus information on new products, answers to technical questions submitted by Mac|Life readers, recommendations from the latest offerings in the iTunes Music Store, and more.