About Me
Pointless, Boring, and Lengthy History
Thanks for maintaining enough interest in my site to want to learn about me! My name is Andrew Noyes, as in "noise", and I am a web design hobbyist. I live with my beautiful girlfriend Holly in Canton, Michigan, a Detroit suburb near Ann Arbor. I'm currently enrolled as a second year Computer and Information Science major with an emphasis on Computer Science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, a satellite campus of the University of Michigan system.
I have absolutely no formal training worth mentioning in web design. I took some classes in high school, but not only did they teach awful and antiquated presentational tag-soup HTML, but I walked into those classes capable of acing the final on day one.
My first foray into web development was with Yahoo! GeoCities while I was in middle school. A friend and I decided to go into business together building PCs for family and friends. While we were clever, our entrepreneurial days were limited as we sadly did not succeed in doing any business.
Dreams of self-made riches selling computers to locals open enough to buy home built computers from a couple of twelve year olds faded from my mind, and I maintained a couple of personal sites back before that was cool. Yeah, I thought of it first MySpace, check please. No, I'm not kidding.
As it would seem, every group, clique, or team in the world has its own website, and our Counter-Strike clan would prove to be no different. I built and maintained a self-hosted website (don't tell my ISP) for our clan complete with forums, HLStats, and other dynamic script-kiddie-oriented web software I could get my hands on for free. Unfortunately, I didn't really walk away from the experience with anything marketable because I was a tabled-layout young adult/man in a CSS-layout world. Not that I knew. I mean, come on, everyone uses Internet Explorer anyway.
My first real experience in web design was/is at Link Engineering Company in Plymouth, Michigan. After a year of working there doing miscellaneous operations, like scraping leaves off the roof, cleaning out storage closets, and soldering circuit boards, I was transfered in the Software department as an intern. You know, the kids they keep around to run around the place and update Anti-Virus software and the like. It so happened that around that time, momentum was gaining on a project for redeveloping the web site. Not before long, developing a new web site was my full time job at Link, and remains so to this day. I handle all of the back-end development.
Why did you just tell me all of this crap?
I know, this is lengthy. All you need to know is that you didn't need to know any of it except that last paragraph to know what I'm all about. Working in the real world on a real web development team pushed me to enhance my knowledge and soak up every last hack, method, or miracle I could in various web languages. As I progressed through the process, I became very interested in semantic, valid, accessible, and efficient code. Along the way, I've been asked to do some blasphemous, non-standard and non-compliant things. An through it all, I've become more aware of what a good web design means. I've had a great experience!
I love/hate my job.
The most influential part of my work experience has been that I have had every bad idea imaginable for web design passed through my bullshit detector. I've seen lots of great examples of what NOT to do in web design. I've strived to twist arms and reveal the atrocities of our design, and in the process I've learned some very important principles of the design. The only problem is... I've never had the opportunity to apply any of it.
I am not a designer.
I, in no way, claim to be a professional, especially when it comes to design. I have learned everything I know from my experiences, both good and bad. But I don't occupy a position where I can put my own design principles to work, and especially not one where I can have my design out there for people to critique it. I understand constructive criticism and try my hardest to grow from it. This site is me putting my work in the public realm for all to see and judge my abilities, my design, my code and for me to grow my skills. I want to learn to be a good web designer; this site is probably only my tenth site design. Ever.