About

I’m Garrick, I’m a geek who makes a living designing websites,  mostly via 99designs.

I’m born and raised in Manila, Philippines, currently working in our family business – my day job, but since my schedule here is not hectic, I’m able to do my Web Design work here as well.

When not at work I enjoy photography, playing basketball, detailing – cars in general, and food – who doesn’t love food.

My (Web) Design Journey

I started off in this industry when my brother asked me to re-design and develop his website after I finished college in 1999. I started off with the basic static website and eventually moved to ASP then eventually PHP as the websites grew in content. In total I designed and build around 10 websites for my brother and I still continue to maintain my brother’s websites until today.

I was strictly doing web design services for local clients until 2007 when I landed a freelance job through philweavers.  It was a nice change of pace, and good experience to get under my belt. I was originally hired as a HTML/CSS coder for small projects then eventually was doing custom Joomla templates. The business relationship lasted for over a year then unfortunately because of professional disagreements, I was fired.

As it turned out this was a blessing in disguise because it opened another door for me >> Crowd Sourcing, to be more specific, 99designs. Byron Uy encouraged me to join 99designs and try it out. It wasn’t easy for the 1st few months because I wasn’t winning anything, but I was also encouraged because with every contest that I joined, I was picking up design ideas and concepts from some of the best designers in the world, I mean this site is open to everyone from newbie to pro designers. Eventually I won my first contest after 50 or so contests entered, and I was pumped and joined more contests (411 total), it’s not easy but when you win, its one of the most rewarding experiences for a web designer. You can check my 99designs profile here.

Why Woo Themes?

You maybe asking – “You’re a Web Designer, why the heck are you using a Woo Themes Template?” In fact my wife asked me that when she saw my redesigned website, well… a few reasons:

1st - I had to find a way to get my website up and running as soon as possible with  minimal downtime. From uploading wordpress to setting up the pages, it took me about half a day to complete. If I had started from scratch, it would take me maybe a week or so to design, code, test and debug.

2nd - The theme that I’m using right now fits my current needs, to display my design portfolio and in the future write some articles relating to CSS and WordPress. Yes. I do have plans to come up with my own WordPress Theme for my portfolio in the future, but I’m still brainstorming different ideas and color schemes that will fit. If you’re asking if I have plans to re-design my site in the future, yes I do, but I have a lot on my plate right now so I have to prioritize.

3rd - It’s SEO friendly. Blogs are more search engine friendly and typically get indexed by Google fairly quicker than a standard static or flash site BUT having a blog doesn’t guarantee you’ll appear on the first page of Google – that will depend on what you put in your blog and how you market it – more on that in another topic, however it gives you a solid foundation to build on.

I started this blog so that I can share with you some of my web design work and share some tips in wordpress and css in general but lemme tell you that I’m no expert in WordPress or CSS, what I’m sharing with you are some simple techniques that will hopefully help you in your blogging journey as well.

Regards,

Garrick