Helio Creative is a family owned and operated small business. We are located in beautiful Flagler Beach, FL.
Rule #1: Do good by your fellow man
I’m not going to sell you services that you don’t need. The company motto is Mark 8:36 – “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?” I take that to heart in all of my interactions with clients. Search engine submission services and other “Black Hat” search engine techniques are a scam. You will never find that here; this is a “White Hat” shop. Need E-Commerce or a Content Management System? There are several freely available alternatives to building your own solution that will save you considerable time, head aches and most importantly MONEY. I will help you find the path thats right for you.
Fast Turnaround
One thing that comes with working freelance is that you become accustomed to working very fast because time is critical. I want to spend more time surfing and being with my family, and you want your web site accepting orders yesterday. I understand that the faster I work, everyone wins. That doesn’t mean I sacrifice quality; I will work closely with you so that I understand your goals and that you feel confident those goals are being met.
Some background
As a rule of life I try to be pretty humble and not a big fan of talking myself up but if I don’t tell you what my background is why would you ever get work from me.
I made my first web page in 1998. Not long after that I started working for a non-profit organization called The Florida International Festival as an in house graphic designer mostly doing things like programs for concerts and small brochures. While working for the festival the majority of my work was in printed materials and I consumed as much information as I could in both graphic design, color correction (now referred to as color adjustment) and pre-press operations. While I don’t have a formal degree one might say I got my degree on the job as I worked closely with my projects in all of its phases including the printing as the Festival afforded me that opportunity I took full advantage. I also designed and maintained their web site. I won several Addy Awards for both printed materials and the Festival Web Site over several years.
After the Festival I transitioned to a newspaper circulation and marketing department where I worked on just about anything and everything you can imagine from promotional items to flyers, racks, direct mail, billboards – you name it I have probably made art for it.
In 2000 I first registered Helio Creative as a business in Daytona Beach. After 3 years of working in marketing and continuing to make web sites in my free time I quickly realized there was more opportunity in the web development arena and so I moved in to the online department of the newspaper where I started getting more involved in creating standards based websites separating design from code. I also started picking up programming languages and started building simple content management systems in PHP and MySQL. The newspapers development environment of choice however was ASP.NET and C# and so I took to learning that platform. Even though it was horrible for making standards based web sites I essentially made a career of pushing bending and molding that platform and custom controls to bring web standards to every project I worked on. Of course the .NET framework has made many improvements in that regard since version 1.1 and .NET MVC has provided so much control to the front end developer including view engines like spark that this issue is for all intents and purposes non-existent.
After 6 years with the Festival and newspaper I found employment close to home in Palm Coast working in marketing and development for a local software company. Not long after starting there the AJAX approach to web site development took off and I have been working in that methodology ever since in PHP, ASP.NET and .NET MVC and more recently Ruby on Rails.
In August of 2010 – 12 years, what feels like a hundred web sites and a thousand printed items, 10 years after first creating the business – I went out on my own and started doing Helio Creative full time.
One of the ways I describe my passion for my work is by saying “I like making things people can use”. I’m a huge proponent of the end user and work diligently to ensure what I create has a balance of design and usability – but the design should never interfere with the usability. I take the same approach to web site content and search engines. We all want a beautiful web site but it should never be at the expense of find-ability. That is, the ability of search engines like Google actually finding the web site.
What’s a Helio?
Wondering what it means? Everyone has a story, so Helio Creative should have one too. When I was just starting out as a designer living in Ormond Beach, FL, I did most of my first work on one of those purple iMacs. I’m also a avid gardener so when I decided to do some freelance work, a friend of mine suggested I call my business “Helio” after the purple flower Heliotrope. I like purple, I like flowers and I am creative. Cheesy story, but that is how I got the name and it stuck. It’s been 10 years, why change now?
