About John Fontana

My fascination with computer technology began at an early age, so when I was offered the opportunity to learn to program BASIC on an Apple IIe at age 15, I leapt at the chance...Of course, things have come a long way since the gigantic floppy drives and 48kb of RAM (!)...

From there I remained thoroughly involved with computer technology, especially pertaining to graphics, and began designing for print as software became available. Working at a neighborhood print shop during high school and college, I helped transform a traditional film-based print shop to a computer-based print production facility. As web technology blossomed in the 90's, I designed the company's first web page, and built it's very first Website-for-hire in 1997. The Website included a game activity written in PERL, and was considered state-of-the-art at the time.

With that experience, I became fascinated with the possibilities of functional programming on the web, building several Websites using PERL. These were the days of the "webmaster", where one person took a site form concept, design and coding, to completion. It has since become standard practice to divide and delegate tasks such as customer interaction, design, and coding between separate people, although I continue to offer the ability to take a site through all of its stages and maintain a direct line of communication with the customer in that old-fashioned "webmaster" mindset. There is a unique synergy and benefit to be obtained - less is lost in communication, and the workflow can benefit tremendously without the need to involve multiple parties for simple changes. Of course, I also happily enlist other talented designers and programmers for projects where their strengths will benefit the final product.

Throughout the late 90's and 00's, I resisted the temptation to join any of the frantic dot-coms that fueled the "internet bubble", instead focusing on medium-sized businesses seeking to extend their businesses to the web in imaginative ways. Winslow Press (now Readandclick.com), was among the earliest - a children's book publisher realizing the potential of the web to expand on the possibilities of books - WinslowPress.com featured interactive games, learning activities and discussions for each and every book they published. This later extended into Read, Click & Learn - a complete Learning Management System built from the ground-up in Cold Fusion, and focused on giving students of different learning abilities the tools they need to keep up with school curricula, even providing a completely web-based interactive text-to-speech system, and allowing for SCORM export of its unique e-learning content to other established LMS platforms.

Today, I continue to embrace the newest technologies and standards, including table-free CSS layouts, model-view-controller frameworks, Ajax and Web 2.0 interactivity, with the unique perspective of a developer who has been there since the very beginning of the web.