Cat Scratch Web Services is based in Erie, Colorado. I develop custom websites, content-management systems, database applications, and visual tools for small businesses and specialized projects along Colorado’s Front Range and beyond.
My path into web development was not a straight line. It began with an interest in oceanography, turned toward photography, continued through technical support and business-data systems, and eventually led to more than two decades of independent website and software development.
My first professional ambition was to become an oceanographer. I spent a year at Oregon State University, working part-time in an oceanographer’s lab sorting plankton in bottles.
I eventually changed direction and earned a Bachelor of Arts in Photography from Ohio State University. While a student, I stepped away for half a year to study at Salzburg College in Austria, followed by six weeks of traveling through Europe with a Eurail pass.
I spent several years working with film cameras, including medium-format and 4 × 5-inch view cameras. Photography taught me to pay attention to composition, detail, presentation, and the way people interpret visual information.
Sometime after graduation, I moved to California with photography still in my genes. I spent a few years working as a photographer, doing occasional commercial work but mostly photographing seascapes along the California and Oregon coasts. My business cards carried the name Seventh Realm Photography.
Photography also took me on my first journey to Asia, where I visited Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
While living in the Bay Area, I fell into a temporary position at Sun Microsystems. There I discovered that I really enjoyed technical support, solving problems, organizing information, and helping people understand complicated systems. That temporary opportunity developed into a long career.
My work at Sun gradually expanded from frontline technical support into team leadership, business analysis, reporting, data analysis, documentation, training, and program management. I often worked between the people using the systems and the teams building them—collecting requirements, identifying problems, organizing data, and translating operational needs into practical tools.
During my years at Sun, I returned to Asia several times, including additional visits to Thailand and Indonesia. In 1998, when Sun moved a major portion of its operations to Colorado, I jumped at the opportunity and settled in Erie.
Projects included service-level databases, technician profiles, resource scheduling, outage communication, management reporting, and systems that combined information from several internal sources. I also helped move prototypes into supported production applications, coordinated enhancements and release schedules, wrote documentation, and trained technicians, managers, and business users.
That experience still influences how I work today. Software is not successful merely because it functions. It must present useful information clearly, fit the way people actually work, and remain understandable after development is complete.
I established Dotted i Web Design & Solutions in 2002 and began developing websites for small businesses and professional clients.
The work gradually moved beyond ordinary web pages. Clients needed custom forms, databases, reports, image galleries, administration systems, and practical ways to manage their own information. That led me deeper into PHP, MySQL, responsive design, server administration, and custom application development.
Dotted i remains active as the local-service side of the business. Cat Scratch Web Services expands that work into a broader home for custom websites, business applications, Vision CMS, and media technology.
Vision CMS grew from years of building custom administration tools for individual clients. It provides a flexible foundation for combining a public website with the tools each business needs to manage its content and records.
Vision CMS has been developed in collaboration with Shovon Choudhury, whose technical work has helped turn many of these ideas into a broader and more capable platform.
Today, my work brings together website development, database applications, and the visual interests that first drew me to photography. Our services range from business websites and administration tools to high-resolution image presentations.
Some projects serve businesses close to home. Others reach much farther. Our work with Mamadou Bissirou Barry—King Farado, a heavyweight boxer based in Conakry, Guinea—is one example of a highly personal international project combining identity, imagery, storytelling, and custom website development.
I am interested in technology when it solves a real problem. The objective is not to bury clients under technical language or sell them features they do not need.
The process begins by understanding the business, the people who will use the system, and the problem that needs to be solved. From there, the goal is to create something organized, understandable, visually effective, and practical to manage.
Cat Scratch Web Services continues to grow toward the broader Cat Scratch Digital organization while remaining grounded in the same principle: technology should serve people.
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Cat Scratch Web Services
167 Montgomery Dr.
Erie, CO, USA 80516
Phone: +1 303-926-0167