About Four Staples
I started Four Staples in summer 2009, following my first year at the University of Manitoba. I figured it was time to take advantage of the skills I'd been training for so long, especially at such a financially critical time of my life. When I'm not in school, I'm developing standards-compliant websites and web applications for myself or others.
Web technologies I take advantage of include (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL. For a detailed breakdown of technologies in which I'm proficient, please see my portfolio. I guarantee and personally verify that all of my work complies with the latest standards in code and accessibility, which makes for fast websites that are accessible by anyone in the world. After all, that is the beauty of the internet.
To contact me regarding my work, please feel free to give me a call at (204) 250-7641, preferably after 5pm CST. I can also be reached by email at daniel@fourstaples.com. This is currently where all work requests are being received, however, I plan to add functionality to this site for form-based submissions in the not-too-distant future.
If my workload is light, chances are I'll be able to take on anything you have for me!
What sets Four Staples apart from the rest?
I know there are a lot of web development companies out there-- even just in Winnipeg, your options are almost endless. So what makes my service superior?
My philosophy is that when a client purchases a website, it should be theirs to do with as they please. Most other companies will continue to bill you for any updates or maintenance to your site after they get it up and running. I think there's something wrong with this.
When you hire me to develop a site for you, I will make it so you can update the content whenever you want! No more pricey bill-by-the-hour nonsense. Of course, if you still want me to take care of updates on your site, that is not a problem, and I think you'll find my prices for that are very reasonable.
I also do not use pre-made templates to design your website, each and every design I come up with is new and original in its own way. I will also make sure to fluidly integrate any colors or logos that are representative of you or your company into your design.
Daniel-- The guy behind it all
Warning: you are about to hear my life story. If you did not ask for it, I sincerely apologize.
Hi, I'm Daniel, the owner of Four Staples Web Solutions. Ever since I was about 10 years old, I've been fascinated by computers and the internet. I started out playing DOS games and writing stories in Microsoft Word, as that's about all there was to do on our family's Windows 3.1 machine. A year or so later, we got a fancy new Compaq computer with Windows ME, and soon to follow, we were setup with dial-up internet.
Come my 12th living year, I had become quite familiar with the internet, but I wanted to know how it all worked. I started playing around with Netscape Composer (crazy retro webpage editor, by today's standards) to create my own web page. How I got so caught up in it, I'll never know... I never did get my own website until several years later. I just made webpages by dragging and dropping images and links on the screen, then looked at my own work with inexplicable satisfaction.
Of course, this eventually got old, and I wanted to know more. I borrowed The Complete Idiot's Guide to Creating an HTML 4 Web Page from my school library, and started learning how to code my own pages from scratch. It was a lot slower, but it gave me a much greater feeling of accomplishment when I learned how to do something new. For the better part of the next 2 years I played around with HTML, and thanks to our new high-speed connection with unlimited hours per month, I was able to get some more current information from online tutorials and help forums.
In 2004, a new trend started to appear online... blogging! This is when I decided it was time for me to make my own personal website. My first blog was hand-coded and hand-updated (by editing the HTML files myself-- and creating new ones and modifying links in old ones). It was tedious, but I kept it up for a few months. Despite it being at a relatively obscure address... http://216.36.173.149 (I hosted it myself), it actually got quite a bit of traffic from the WebDeveloper Forums, which I once visited frequently. By the way, if you happen to be an aspiring developer, I highly recommend you check out those forums... I learned a lot of what I know on there.
After a little while, my first big break came along (if that's what you want to call it). My mom had recently started working at CD Awards - a small business in my home town. They did not have a website at the time, but rather a CD that they burnt and gave to clients that had some webpages with listings of products on it. My mom asked me if I would like to try putting together a site for them, and I accepted the challenge eagerly.
Since I was still learning, the website took a crazy long time to finish-- probably about a year, give or take. I originally designed the entire site without any use of server-side scriping or database. All of the files were written from scratch by hand, and I needed a file for every single product and category. Just as I was about finished with that, I decided to start over again-- from scratch, this time using my newly acquired PHP and MySQL skills. It was definitely the right decision, and the result is what you see today, at CDAwards.net. Switching to PHP and MySQL allows them to update their own website any time they want, without having to get ahold of me to arrange it.
I continued expanding my knolwedge for the next little while, taking on a few smaller projects on the side, such as the Town of Carberry 125th Anniversary website. When I was 15, another break came. One of the people that I talk to online on a regular basis (whom I met on the WebDeveloper Forums) had mentioned my name to Ryan Gillette, owner of AzroTech Web Solutions in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Ryan checked out some of my work, gave me a project to test my skills, and it wasn't long before I was doing regular contract work for him.
Towards the end of 2006, I took a bit of a haiatus from web development. I had just become worn out, due to there not being a lot of new material to work with, and jobs becoming fewer and far between. I didn't do much apart from the occasional side project until spring 2008, when I did a bit more work for Ryan. Come summer time, I had made plans to travel to California to see a close friend. I still wanted to work for Ryan from California (but not get paid there of course, due to the legal restrictions) and he gave me an assignment to work on. I emailed him a few days later with a question regarding that assignment, and I haven't heard back from him since. He seems to have just disappeared.
AzroTech's website was changed with the new year to read Copyright 2009, but I have no idea if someone changed it or if it was a PHP script that just prints out the current year.
Since then, I have been brushing up on my skills, remembering everything I had forgotten during my year and a half break, and learning everything new (there is surprisingly little, actually). Now I'm ready to work again, and I want to do it all this time. I enjoy every aspect of web development-- the designing, the splicing, the back-end scripting, even the debugging. Four Staples allows me to do all of this, while keeping a close relationship with my clients. It's one of those things that just works for everyone.