I've been online for a while. I have the snobbish and slightly ivory tower view of an early adopter -- fourth grade in my case -- and I think of it in different terms from the real world. It took me a while to get over banner ads, even though I can never find the table of contents in any of my printed magazines. I thought ecommerce was wierd brouhaha that would just go away -- no-one normal was ever going to buy books through that "amazon" thing that advertised in bOING bOING. Of course, stuff changes. My hometown now has several isps, not just aol, and when I was trolling one recently, I found the resume of a guy who had a job a lot like my last job at Datek -- ColdFusion, html and design. I was kinda amazed that this guy existed, so I went to look at the sites that he had made. His best example was a site called pigcare.com, which was dedicated to marketing "the premier on-farm data system". The surprising thing about pigcare.com is not that it exists, but that it looks as professional as it does -- while it doesn't break any new ground, it certainly looks better than the average isp's homepage. The text is well written, the architecture is clear, and the black and white diagrams explain the product well. Pigcare's site is better nutured than most of the sites I visit in a given day. If these people can get it right, why can't anyone? It's a product; the site sells it. If I felt increasingly alienated from the .com world while I was working in it, pigcare.com is exactly why. I think of myself as an [applied] artist -- I do have a BFA after all -- and I can't imagine myself as a non-designer. I found the idea of web talents as commodities frightening, and pigcare.com is unsettling to me. Pigcare.com is home not of talent but skill -- the creator is even A+ certified in html. Like most well done brochure sites it benefits from the web's democratisation of access, but I don't know that it gets added value from being on the web. In any case, it's there and worth a visit before you start your next site. I think of it as a challenge to every commercial site out there. We have no excuse for our sites not working as well as Pigcare.com.