About Brian Cray
Although I've been on the web since AOL was the best it had to offer, I didn't use it professionally until around 2003. At the time I was working in IT, but I hated the IT anti-user mentality and I wanted out. So, I decided to take two major steps to take a different path in my life: Learn to build powerful, useful websites and go to school for Marketing.
For my marketing degree I focused on learning why people do what they do and what influences them. I also learned the importance of strategy, accountability, and measurement. Today this background plays a large role in how I differentiate my skillset.
To learn web design & development on my own I read every good book I could get my hands on, including Designing Web Usability, The Design of Sites, Design of Everyday Things, PHP & MySQL Web Development, and Designing with Web Standards, among others.
So much inspiration poured in that I needed an outlet, so I built Ohio Disc Golf Project—an online community for Ohio disc golfers—as my first major website and launched it in spring of 2004. Ohio Disc Golf Project has remained a testing ground and fun project ever since.
4 years later, after exhausting work going to school and working full-time, I graduated at the end of 2008 with a Bachelor's of Science in Marketing from Franklin University. In my first year out of school, I made a name for myself on the Web by building popular, useful websites, such as Nearby Tweets and PXtoEM.com.
Today, I continue to use my unique combination of marketing and IT expertise and experience to provide measurement-driven, user-focused web consulting. I have a proven track record of building websites that just work, and plenty of new projects in the pipeline that provide value to people seeking simplicity and tired of the IT anti-user mentality.