Rafael Fitzsimmons

I started building servers as a teenager so my friends and I could play World of Warcraft the way we wanted to play it. Not just hosting a world. Changing the rules inside it.

That is still the part I like. Not picking a template and filling in the blanks, but getting underneath something and making it behave the way it should have in the first place.

Self taught, and specific about what that means

No degree and no agency background. Three years building sites for clients, and a couple of decades before that taking computers apart because I wanted to know how they worked. What I can show you instead of a credential is the work, which is the only thing anyone hiring a web designer actually looks at.

I have run businesses, which changes what I build

Before this I ran a limousine company in Chicago for several years, and I have started two brands of my own since. That matters more than it sounds. A website is not a brochure. For a working business it should bring in the right jobs, quietly turn away the wrong ones, and stop you answering the same four questions on the phone forty times a week.

That is why most of the builds on this site have a form that collects what the owner actually needs before a conversation starts, rather than a contact box that says "get in touch".

What I build with

Hand-written front ends rather than page builders. Cloudflare Workers and serverless back ends for anything that needs to do real work, which keeps running costs near zero at small-business scale. Integrations with whatever software you already use rather than replacing it. Bilingual builds done properly, with parallel content and correct hreflang, not a translate widget.

Working anywhere

Based in Jackson, Wyoming, and deliberately set up to work from anywhere. Projects have shipped in English, Spanish and Japanese. The time zone has never been the hard part of a build.