CurtCo Media Group

After high school was over I began working part-time at CurtCo Media Group as a night-time security guard. A few months into the job the owner Bill Curtis had taken an interest in my computing knowledge and gave me an opportunity to demonstrate to him my web design skills. I prepared a small site based on one of his new publications called AudioVideo Shopper, which he found impressing and consequently gave me a full-time job as an Internet Specialist in the Internet Department.

My job as the Internet Specialist was to help CurtCo Media Group expand its service offerings by creating and maintaining a handful of web sites for the company's various high-quality niche market monthly publications. During those times the company had about a dozen publications dealing with a variety of topics such as: Home Entertainment, Sales Automation, Mobile Communications, Mobile Sound Systems (Car Audio), Executive Radio Programs for Airlines, etc.

When I joined CurtCo I became part of a small four member department that consisted of a director, a server administrator, a web architect, and me. The team was later on expanded to about ten with the addition of a project coordinator, another web designer/illustrator, and some interns.

My responsibilities included the development of web sites from start-to-finish based on the specifications of the various magazine publishers, the creation of some original 3D computer generated graphics, and computer programming. Of the twelve magazine titles the company had I eventually became responsible for establishing web presence and maintaining the content for five.

In order to make the sites we consulted with the publishers of each magazine to figure out what type of impression they wanted to create and then did the best we could to transform their ideas into fully operational digital publications. At that time the web sites were updated about once each month with the previous month's content after the new issues were distributed. This included posting anywhere from 20 to 30 new articles to each site every month.

One of the production bottlenecks we had was our ability to process the desired volume of articles. I helped remedy this problem by developing a new processes for importing content from the existing publishing software that the print publications art department used. Doing this involved programming an automation application that converted QuarkXPress exported HTML content into our own specific web page templates. Although not particularly difficult to create, the automation program that I wrote moved us from barely publishing 100 articles per month to publishing all of the articles available (more than 350 at times). At the time this small innovation was substantial automation in our field and eliminated a lot of manual labor for us. The added benefit was that our team had some extra time on our hands that we used to provide web development services to some of the company's advertiser clients.