WebSite Design

Web Presence

Phone (209) 854-2065

 

About Richard Crouch

I have been working in the high tech industry all my life I worked at Siemens in San Jose as an architect and product manager for many years.  The focus of my work at Siemens was telecommunications and Unified Communications.  The Unified Communications work involved a lot of wide ranging web/social networking concepts such as clicking on an email in your inbox and seeing the presence of the sender was available and clicking to place a VoIP call to the sender to talk about the email. 

As part of the Unified Communications work we were developing web based communications clients and the associated web servers to control and manage these clients.  To do my architecture work I needed to keep up on all the web client and server protocols and standards. To keep my hand in I started developing personal websites for my brother and eventually for my wife.

Eventually Siemens needed to consolidate their development and the San Jose development site was closed.  They thought so highly of me that they offered to relocate me to their Florida development center.  While the offer was tempting I thought it best to stay in California even with the poor job market to be had in 2008.  I started to look for architect and product manager jobs in the bay area and simultaneously started to work on developing web sites for other people. 

My first web site was for my wife's doll business. She repairs, appraises and sells antique and vintage dolls and wanted to expand her business. I got her a domain and built her a website for the business.  The site was a commercial success for her business and helped her expand the breadth and width of her doll work.  This led some of her friends and business colleagues seeing her web site and saying that they to needed a website.

In talking with these people I came to realize that while they said the just needed a web site they really needed more.  Their business needed a web presence. They needed people using the web to be able to find their business and be able to decide based on their web presence if they wanted to do business with them.  A website is a part of this but many potential customers searching for a business never get to the web site because the business and its associated website had poor visibility in the various means people were using to find things on the web.   

As I worked with these people on their web sites and web presence I discovered that this was a calling I was good at and enjoyed doing.   As my interest in my web presence business has grown my desire to go back to Silicon Valley has shrunk.  Silicon Valleys loss is the Central Valleys gain. tet