About the studio
Sites by Joe started in a closet. Our bedroom closet, in our tiny house in South Jersey, with two small children at home.
I put an ad in a little local real estate periodical, and it landed me my first website job. That one job started it all.
Maryellen was my partner from the very beginning. I built the websites, and she ran just about everything else. We ran it together from 2004 to 2011, and she helped build it into a wonderful studio.
Business Manager, 2004 - 2011
Building websites is the fun part. Keeping a small business running is the hard part, and that was Maryellen. She kept the books, the clients, the calendar and me organized, so the work got done and the bills got paid.
What she handled:
She also sat through a lot of long speeches about boring nerdy topics and pretended to be interested. That might be her most impressive skill.
She's completely book crazy, too. She has her own library at home, and it's better organized than most of my code.
Designer & Developer, 2004 - 2011
I built the websites, a couple hundred of them, all by hand. You can see a few of them in the museum.
Not too shabby for a closet.