RainbowGuitars.com

As a retail store in Tucson, Arizona, Rainbow Guitars had weathered the brutal conditions that have transpired in the music business over the past thirty years. They have done this by selling quality products at great prices, but more importantly by enlisting an educated and friendly sales staff. The store has garnered a reputation throughout the world for buyers who appreciate the extra attention and knowledge that the Rainbow staff brings to the market. As a result they have a dedicated following of collectors and musicians.

The goal of RainbowGuitars.com was to bring the store to life online. The Sales staff is present via professional photos throughout the site, ready to help via email or chat if you have a question on a product.

The site uses a clean modern design sensibility that doesn’t stand in the way of the giant photos available for each product.

Photos.com

Price fixing had been a long-standing problem in the stock photos market. Industry giants Getty and Corbis would meet once a year to dictate pricing for both royalty-free and rights-managed images which trickled down to the entire industry. My experience with ClipArt.com gave me insight into a gap in between the clipart and stock photo markets. There was a group of people who wanted the quality of stock imagery but didn’t have the budget to pay $400-$600 per photo.

I built Photos.com in an attempt to fill the needs of this market by delivering tens of thousands of professional-grade stock photos for one low subscription price. Photos.com was making over one-million dollars a month within eighteen months after its initial launch. It continues to thrive today in North America and around the world.

AllBusiness.com

The founders of AllBusiness.com vowed to set the standard for 21st Century publishing. The small team they assembled at AllBusiness set out to build a system from the ground up that would automate content import, categorization, publishing and behavior optimization. This goal became the 2006 redesign of AllBusiness.com.

My contribution to this redesign included taking the lead on all elements of the user interface. I managed the design and information architecture, created a forward-looking relevance-based navigation model, and wrote 100+ specifications for all front-end components. I also took the lead on integrating and piloting an enterprise-level multi-variant testing system to fine tune the site post launch.

Through deep data analysis I was able to improve several conversion events across the site including maximizing pages-per-session, click-through rates for both IAB and cost-per-click advertisements, ecommerce revenue, newsletter signups and more. As the leader of the UI Team I was able to work with cross-functional team leaders to set company-wide design and navigation standards from supporting data.

RebelArtist.com

In 2001 I built RebelArtist.com as a user-generated content experiment, and as a way to accumulate new and diverse content not already prolific on the Web. My team and I spent many months building advanced upload, pricing and management tools for artists who contributed to the site. RebelArtist.com had just under 1,000 artists selling illustrations, photos and fonts at its peak. We supported these artists via a private user forum and used their feedback as real-time requirements for product development. Together in partnership with these artists, we refined the site to be a fantastic ecommerce product.

Before the site was closed to focus on Photos.com, it managed to inspire the founders of iStockPhoto.com who went on to sell their site to Getty for millions of dollars.

Clipart.com

ArtToday.com was a clipart site saddled with a portal, a complicated pricing model and all sorts of tools and services when I took it over. Within a year I had stripped off everything except a search box making it a single-function online application. I also instituted a time-based pricing model offering access to the entire database of images and fonts for one low price.

I re-branded the site from ArtToday.com to ClipArt.com and kicked off a “root-domain” model that led to the acquisition and/or creation of other root-domain sites including Photos.com, Animations.com, Graphics.com and more. This concept leveraged the inherent benefits of owning a core search term as the website’s domain name. As a result these sites all received top placement on search engines, moving the product purchase proposition to the top of the buy process where it starts. These changes doubled ClipArt.com’s revenue topping out at six-million dollars per year during my tenure.

iClipart.com

The clipart market had changed since I had managed ClipArt.com, and I had some additional thoughts about the market and brand positioning since I did. I was asked to implement my ideas and build them out for the maiden launch of iClipart.com, a direct competitor to ClipArt.com.

I chose to go after the female market by using a soft color palate and streamlined the interface to place emphasis on the images themselves. I steered the founders of the company away from a three word domain name and into purchasing iClipart.com. This was just before Google launched iGoogle, and Apple announced its plans to launch the iPhone, solidifying the “i” prefix as a distinct Web 2.0 moniker.

iClipart.com immediately resonated with the clipart market and sales have been increasing steadily since launch.

AirstreamTrailers.com

This site started out as an experiment in search engine optimization. We had built a strategy for ClipArt.com that was very effective and I wanted to see if I could replicate the model in a different market.

I was restoring my 1955 Airstream Overlander and noticed that there were very few resources on the Web for vintage Airstream owners. I collected as many related links I could find and posted them on AirstreamTrailers.com. I had chosen the number two search term for people searching for Airstream information as my domain name (second to airstream). My next step was to solicit links from other related sites as they came online to gain link popularity. It wasn’t long before I had inlinks from almost every Airstream related site. These two elements combined with onsite SEO best practices shot AirstreamTrailers.com up to the number two position on Google for the most relevent keywords term. After seven years online, the site still hovers between positions two through four.

I get kind messages all the time from fellow Airstreamers praising the usefulness of the site, the sleek design and ease of finding the information they need.

Egreetings.com

I caught the head of the dotcom bubble as it accelerated through 1999-2000 as an early employee and the sole Site Producer at Egreetings.com. During my tenure, the company grew to over 200 employees while I managed eleven direct reports charged with programming the site.

As a key stakeholder in the site’s development, I led a team of department heads to define the production process from Editorial Meetings through specification, design, production and QA. I aligned releases with retail drive periods as Egreetings.com moved toward ecommerce. I also worked with Sales and Business Development to integrate strategic partners and advertising clients throughout the site.

The company went public in May of 2000 with an expected valuation of one billion dollars. Within a year the company sold for pennies on the dollar. My time at Egreetings was a true dotcom bubble experience.

CentralCoast.com

CentralCoast.com is a vertical-geographic portal for the central coast of California. In 1995 it was the premier online destination for this area of the world with multiple categories for retail, travel, dining, services and more with over 400 local businesses.

I built over 200 stand alone sites for local merchants that populated the portal. We enlisted forward-looking features such as fax-based ecommerce, email-based contact forms, virtual tours and more in 1995-1996, long before these features became Web standards.

• Dan Burke

• San Francisco, CA
•  
• Phone: (415) 377-1569
• Email: tweety@canaryina.com