Introducing Corey Brown

Corey is Chief Instigator at Coreyweb, LLC – a full-service design, development (& more) agency that works exclusively with WordPress as a CMS.

Show Notes

Website | www.coreybrown.me

Website | www.coreyweb.com

Website | www.notreble.com

Linked In | coreybrown

Twitter | @coreyweb

Episode Transcript

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 21.

Tara: Welcome to Hallway Chats, I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Corey Brown. Corey is the chief instigator at Coreyweb LLC, a full-service design, development, and more agency. He works exclusively with WordPress as a CMS. He’s been doing web work since 1995 and he says he loved every minute of it. Hi Corey, good morning.

Corey: Hey, good morning. Thanks for having me.

Tara: Hey Corey, good to see you. Welcome to Hallway Chats. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself after that great intro that Liam shared?

Corey: Sure. I guess what’s interesting is how for my professional career and over my life, it’s how things came together that I didn’t quite expect. As a musician growing up, that was my big passion. But I also had this passion for computers so when I was, I guess, about 11 or 12 years old, I mowed lawns and I did everything I could to make money. I bought one of those Commodore VIC-20s. don’t know if you’re old enough to remember those, but it was one of the first home computers on the market. And I learned BASIC, I took classes and I was writing programs. I kind of put that on the shelf during my high school years because I was all in on music and I ended up majoring music in college. It took a lot of crazy turns from that and ended up becoming a graphic designer which is kind of a family business in my family. I was a third generation graphic designer in my family. That all started out doing everything by hand, the old-fashioned way, the way my grandfather did and my father did. Then suddenly the Mac came on, so here I am again, computers. And I’ve always loved technology, so the graphic design world and getting on the Mac and learning all that brought me to the web at ’95. I was the art director of [a catalogue company. The CEO came down to my office and said, “We need a website.” I was like, “Okay.” I didn’t know anything about it and I love telling a story that, like, the web was so tiny, nobody cared, there was no book on HTML back then. There was no market for any of that because it was so tiny. Somebody said, “Oh yeah, there’s this thing called view source. Go to any website you want and view the source and see how they do things.” I started deconstructing sites I liked and learning HTML. At the time, I was really burned out on the whole graphic design world, pretty tired of it. I didn’t like how permanent everything was, I would never sleep at night before we set the catalog to the printer, having nightmares all night about mistakes. I love how on the web there are mistakes but they’re easy to fix.

Tara: Yes, I love that too.

Corey: In ’95 when I started, I said, “This is it.