Acknowledgements
Creating my website was an organic process that evolved over more than a year and involved several key people besides myself.
It all began when my friends, Homer and Christine Canelis asked me to help them develop a landscaped area for their ridgetop home in the coastal hills of Sonoma County. Christine had a vision for a welcoming entrance, so she and I spent some time looking at several older homes around our community that featured trellises and arbors. Most of these were modestly built, lacking grace and character. Then she found a picture in a magazine which suggested the arched shape with substantial sized members, and we had a concept. Homer had an older dry Redwood log he and his father had pulled out of Austin Creek years before, and some old-growth Redwood salvaged from a water tank. The pictures on the Artisan Woodwork page chronicle the process of creating this unique piece.
My friend, Andrea Record—sculptor, musician, writer, and photographer—offered to take pictures of this and another of my recent projects. It was she who planted the seed that I should develop a website when she saw my work. She has an unusual and beautiful website for her business, Studio Nouveau and convinced me that I needed to move into the 21st Century myself. After letting the idea lie dormant for a number of months, I started the process by working on a portfolio of pictures of the special jobs I had done over nearly 30 years of building. When it came time to actually design the website, Andrea offered to let me use the antique sepia background that she had created herself for her website.
My sister, Billy Trent, loaned me her digital camera and spent countless hours processing and downloading several hundred pictures onto CD’s, setting me up with an on-line photo service, and encouraging me to make our family’s business tradition part of my presentation on the Web. I ended up devoting a special page to that aspect. For it was my father and grandfather who taught me the meaning of work and service in business.
I had looked into the “create it yourself free” website services offered by various internet companies and was not satisfied with those. I knew I would need professional help to create something customized and special to get my message out there. Then lightning struck when I met Buffie Harris, who operates Design Orbit. We immediately hit it off and after our first get-together, I knew I had found the perfect person to create the website. She listened to me as carefully as I do with my clients, to get an intuitive feel for what I wanted. Her work consistently exceeded my expectations.
My clients (with whom I often become friends) whose homes and testimonials appear here have my heartfelt thanks for allowing me to come back and take pictures years later.
To say “thank you” to all these people who were instrumental in helping me is hardly adequate. Without any one of them, this website would have never come to fruition in the way that it has.
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