MuseArts Turns 25 Years Old

A bit of business news here. MuseArts, Inc., our web design company, has now been in business over 25 years. Lise and I started doing professional web design in September of 1997.

How daring was that? There was no Google, nor RSS, Craigslist, Mozilla, YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter when we started.

One of the first things we decided was that we’d do work for other people, but also for ourselves. This would allow us to have some things we owned and controlled, have some fun, but also gave us a way to experiment with things that people weren’t necessarily paying us to do.

Our first personal project was a gothic mansion of over 150 rooms that could be explored by clicking in different parts of images – www.castlearcana.com. At the time, the images filled most computer screens, and was considered a bandwidth hog at the time, require people to keep downloading images, and some were as big as 100k!  It still is in operation, and you can go explore the three floors of the house, plus gardens maze, and more.

Another one of our side projects that you might be aware of is iBrattleboro.com – one of the first sites in the US to allow ordinary people share news and information with their neighbors. Yup, right here in Brattleboro. It was a bit radical to use the world wide web to communicate in a hyperlocal area, but soon had lots of imitators, including major news outlets who started using user videos and comments as part of their coverage.

We’ve helped hundred of clients over the years with web sites, from mom and pops up to Fortune 500 companies. That means 25 years of web sites, logos, animations, videos, interactive games and puzzles, posters, image repair, exhibits, consultation, databases, e-commerce, shopping carts, social media, SEO, and more.

We like to keep things simple and make sure they are useful, if at all possible. We use personal projects to learn about the “bleeding edge” tech, and deploy the best to our clients after we are confident it will work. We often start with beta versions or 1.0 versions of software, but wait until they reach 3.0 or better before offering it to others. I can recall a company called iSmell (yes, really…) that wanted to put scented oil diffusers next to computers so that web pages could be coded to trigger scents. View a photo of a forest and smell pine. That sort of thing. Ahead of their time in the late 1990’s.  : )

25 feels like quite a milestone, especially in internet-years. 

I remember when we went to do some business consultation before we incorporated. We were asked typical business questions by a retired but experienced businessperson – “Where will you be located?” At home. “What area will you serve?” Potentially anywhere on the entire globe, but probably the US and New England. “What products will you sell and where will you story inventory?” They’ll be digital, and we’ll provide internet services.

Our helper was confused. We were destined to fail in his view with no good location, no offices, no products. He, and many others, had barely heard of the internet.  If we had a store or restaurant we wanted to get going, that would be different.

56k modems were all the rage, and we were very early adopters of DSL as soon as it was available.  

All web pages were coded by hand using HTML until code editors came along. No WYSIWYG at first.  Custom databases were often built to handle unique requirements. There weren’t established services to use, or existing code to copy. We learned to be efficient and effective, as well as understand what’s going on “under the hood.”

For the most part, Lise is our coder and I do our graphics and design. This gives our clients a great balance of technical know-how and making things look good.  If they’ve seen something somewhere, we can probably do it (if the budget allows.)

What’s in store for the next 25 years of the internet?  In many ways, the fun days are over. There was a great period when everyone had their own blogs and shared unique content that you’d stumble across. Very democratic, and people weren’t tracked or spied upon.  Increasingly the internet has become corporate and controlled. Search for something and the first result is store. Or one of five major sites. That’s a bad trend.

I do expect AR and VR to boost 3D web experiences. I expect some new social media upstart to bump the current class. I expect that designing for wrist-size screens will be a useful skill. And despite the availability of “free web sites,” I think there is along future in web development for those who know what they are doing. If you have a site, you often have questions or problems and you’d like someone you know and trust to take a look. That local expert is a blessing to get on the phone personally, rather than deal with robotic chats and hold music of faceless companies with cute logos.

For MuseArts, we’re going to keep helping people with web sites, exhibits, and design and share the collective 50 years of internet experience gained between the two of us. And we’ll keep having fun with our own side projects to try new things. Get in touch if you need anything.