Welcome to ericRHEA.com!
Regardless of how you found the site, this Starting Guide will get you started to the many little things Eric likes to work on to keep busy. Now, it is quite likely that you rank yourself one of those folks who wonder why the internet needs another self-serving webpage dripping with personal bombast of just how awesome the author is. Well, it's the next logical step.
It probably would be best to take you back to the origin of this particular site. In short, a few years ago Eric thought it would be a handy idea for his consultancy to have a website to help organize all the happenings that were going on. It started as a very small branch of the studio he was operating at the time and the general thought was, "it's where everything else goes that I can't figure out what to do with".
Over time, as business came and went, and the consultancy began to grow, Eric realized that he needed a bit more muscle behind the domain. So, he revamped the design and tossed up all the technologies that he himself was familiar with, plus the ever expanding roster of projects that he and his staff worked on. One of the observations that Eric will be writing on in the future ties into this idea that companies, and this is notoriously true in certain media enterprises, are attempts by people to rebrand and distance themselves from their true past. Eric realized that if you have a legitimate, positive reputation, past, and present, then distancing seems kind of silly, doesn't it?
As winter sapped away all the day light, Eric scaled back a bit on his worldly adventures to put more time into his website. This place. He realized, after many long thoughts, that he was going to have to evolve from a self-focused wares-hawking, consultancy growing capitalist to someone that found a way to help others have an improvement in their own lives.
In his own words, "You know, it took me about two weeks of thinking about it to realize that self promotion that was and still is pretty hip on the net with LIONS/ONS and other SNSs were inherently evil, the kind of small business networking evil that crops up here and there. What benefit was there in these little cliques? None, frankly. Just a waste of time while everyone has a pissing contest over this that or the other. Instead, I realized that I could plead for cash to fund my projects while at the same time helping people out. That way I could move my projects forward, my staff would get paid and have more hours available for work, and most importantly, I'm helping to make the world a little bit better of a place."
So, Eric began constructing a new website. One that would not only organize his interests, show the projects he and his staff were working on, but also provide resources to what he calls his "future friends". "I have no doubt", Eric tells me, "that in some point in the future I'll be running across some people whose lives will be impacted by the site. With a good deal of luck, it'll be for the better. So you can bet that I'll be putting a ton of safeguards in place to CMA. But really, it should be a great deal of fun. If at the end of the day just one person has a better day from something they found on the site and, in return, they find some way to barter, donate, give, or actually buy something we've worked on, then that'll be the realization of the ultimate golden rule: that there's no shame in making money, but you should improve the life of someone other than yourself in some small way."
From here, we'll continue to post additional guides to the site as the full site comes online. The goal is to, over the natural course of time, post guides to the site that are of some relevance. Eric has mentioned his belief in "posts that matter" over and beyond posts that are frequent in nature. "Sure you can game the SEO system and go for the gold on your page display index. Why bother though? I've got more important things to work on right now. If we're putting up content that matters, then everything will work out just fine. And if we're not, then I'm on the wrong path with the whole concept. Something tells me I'm not."
We couldn't agree more.
