A little about Neil Thurlwell
In my previous post I only told you how long I have been in the industry. Well I have done a lot in my time.
I started off in the sales department of Business Serve. This is where my thirst for the internet started. Unfortunatley I missed the .com boom which I was really annoyed about, but what the hay ! I moved from the sales department of Business Serve and became an account manager. No, not one of those guys who plays with numbers all day…….. I managed around 1000 customer accounts, advising and helping them get the most from their websites. I then decided that I could help my clients even more if I learnt first hand what I was talking about.
So I started learning html. I remember giving up after about half an hour on my first attempt. I don’t think learning code at 6am with a hangover was such a good idea. I soon started again. I then registered a couple of domain names. LRJH Kids and Fleece Blankets. These were 2 of my first websites I ever built and to look back now on www.archive.org I cringe at the state of them but we all start somewhere.
I decided then to set up my own business selling kids bedding and blankets, as I already had a really good generic domain name. This progressed to heavily using eBay and getting in to sportswear and mobile phone accessories (I own www.simfree.com if anyone wants to buy it).
The 2 main areas I decided to concentrate my efforts were web design and seo. I needed the web design to design a good website and then seo to make sure I was getting plenty of traffic. As I started to become more knowledgable and professional in these areas I decided to set up my own business doing design and seo for clients. This was (and still is Business Internet Consultants). One thing lead to another and I left my business for a nice little job co-managing SEO Studio which I then ran for a while before leaving.
I now work for Customer Street in the seo department. Although I’m in the Customer Street SEO department I sit on the fence between seo and design. I even run my own blog about Customer Street Webdesign. The main issue I see is that web designers and seo guru’s don’t tend to mix. One does one and the other does the other. This is WRONG…..They should work hand in hand to ensure that the website looks good, functions correctly and gets high rankings on the search engines.
Is that too much to ask ?
Not anymore.