CRM Font Company
This is kind of where it all started for my own "career path".
Background
In the early 90s, my dad had designed the elegant Charles Rennie Mackintosh font. Back then, the font was distributed on 3½" floppy disks (remember those?), a black case and foil printed cover.
It was (and still is) a big seller worldwide in those pre-ecommerce days selling in Glasgow museums and others like the Guggenheim in NYC.
Distribution worldwide was becoming an issue for quite a niche small business and in the late 90s dad was looking for ways to cut costs.
With his background in software engineering, he'd heard of the Internet but didn't really know where to start and so hired a local Glasgow web developer to build a website that would sell the font online and offer a digital download.
Sadly for dad, the guy who ran the company was a crook and after paying a whacking great deposit - said business owner disappeared (we later heard that a broken tail light got him arrested).
My introduction to the web
Dad investigated some more and decided that he'd build the site himself and invested in buying:
- Dreamweaver 2 (no laughing at the back)
- Fireworks 2
- Photoshop 5
My interest in having these tools installed on our family PC picked up and I started dabbling with Dreamweaver and Fireworks (I neglected Photoshop for a long time). Pretty soon between us we built this monster:
It was actually quite neat for its time, rollover images, bloated Dreamweaver markup: tables, font tags, web rings. It used this new thing called Paypal for payment and when the customer had paid, their download was delivered by Payloadz.
The Naughties
As dad designed more fonts, updating became cumbersome and we moved the site onto Xcart before moving to Zencart a short time after.
Now
One of the hardest things about developing an ecommerce website is making look pretty. The decision to move to ExpressionEngine was easy and CartThrob made the whole ecommerce process painless and we get to have the site look any way we want. ExpressionEngine and CartThrob don't get in the way.
The site uses:
