About Brandon

Summary

Brandon Dawson is an Ohio-based Internet Consultant and Web Designer, specializing in bringing the benefits of the Joomla CMS to small-to-medium-sized businesses.

Background

He attended Ohio University for two years, completing coursework in business, marketing, and economics before leaving for the workforce.

He spent several years in the tech support trenches, working for a few small, rural Internet Service Providers in both sales and support roles. He has also worked for a major regional ISP, and worked in a sales capacity for [one of the two dominant telecom corporations], handling sales to small business customers billing from $0 to $100,000 in monthly revenue.

Following a round of layoffs in the wake of one of that company’s frequent restructurings following the dot-com bust, Brandon decided to embark on starting his own business, which brings us more or less to the present day.

Professional Highlights

Adapting the popular, open-source Joomla CMS to the needs of customers both big and small, Brandon can deliver to your business the benefits of managing your own website without the cost associated with commercialized solutions.

He also knows how to draw traffic: His personal websites, articles, and other online content have garnered more than 5 million visitors since 2004!

For one major corporate customer, Brandon took a project estimated to have first-year startup costs of $100,000, and reduced the costs to 1.5% of the projections. The project involved the production of an easily replicated and scalable Joomla-based infrastructure for the internal departments of a major Silicon Valley corporation. Brandon produced three of an intended 17 sites, instructing the principal contacts within the company on how to produce the remaining fourteen, as specified by the contract, and writing documentation to support any new employees in how to use and adapt the system further.

For another project, he converted a half-finished off-the-shelf CMS into Joomla for an area newspaper, converting more than 24,000 articles between the two article formats, and launching a completed website in just over a month of development time, including audio/video/photo galleries, a lodging guide, more than 50 content categories, an integrated ad system, and more, and all on a brand-new Dual Quad-Core Xeon architecture server solution that was brought online literally over a single day!

For yet another client, Brandon has been responsible for end-to-end oversight of both online presence and brand identity, overseeing dozens of microsites and creating every piece of graphical marketing material the client used.

Portfolio

His design/development portfolio is available at http://www.athenainternet.com/portfolio.

Core competencies

  • Apache/PHP/CGI/mySQL installation, maintenance, tuning and adaptations
  • Linux system administration and maintenance
  • Adobe Creative Suite
  • Macromedia Dreamweaver and Fireworks
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Content Optimization
  • Sales and Marketing Optimization
  • Multimedia encoding and presentation

Publishing and Public Speaking

Brandon has written a book titled Joomla Cash! for highly-regarded, open source-oriented technology publisher Packt Publishing, published in 2007. The book details how to adapt Joomla to business use, as well as covering many foundational principles of online marketing. He was also a featured speaker at the 2007 Ohio Linux Fest, giving a talk on the same topic as his book.

Last Revision: 12.9.2009

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