About me
To Contact Me
I am easy to get in contact with. On Twitter, I am @_steveCollins and you can always email me at
Who am I?
Born in Philly. Aimed for comic book stardom and failed, falling back on graphic design in the 90’s and turning that into web design and development.
Currently living outside of Philadelphia in West Norriton, Money Magazine’s 59th best place to live in 2011. Live with my beautiful wife, Bernadette, and future heartbreaker of a daughter, Asia.
Blue, Scout, Bennie and the Jets (Huffy and Peef, sometimes Peefer Sutherland) and Fred the Turtle round out our household.
Geek Cred
I’ve been involved in the web since before many people heard of the web. Had an email address and no one to email and a second phone line in the basement for a continual connection.
Cut my teeth on the Commodore 64. Anyone remember, “Press play on tape to load”? From there, moved on to an 8088 with two, that’s right TWO, 3 1/2" floppy drives. Then onto a Packard Bell (ugh), a US Logic and finally to building them myself. In 2006 I stopped custom building and moved to laptops with a Dell Inspiron 9600 and an Alienware M17.
I wanted an Alienware forever. In the 90’s they, along with Falcon Northwest, were real premium computers that no one could really afford. When I finally ponied up the money to get one, it turned into a huge disappointment. Maybe when they were bought by Dell the quality dropped, but this computer was not worth it. It was certainly the most powerful PC I had ever owned, but it just fell apart. Three keyboards and numerous individual key replacements and really poor monitor hinges made this not the Alienware experience I had hoped for.
And on a parallel computing timeline, when I started at Construction Equipment Guide in 1996, I finally got my first REAL computer, a UMAX SuperMac with System 7.5.1 I believe. My Mac history since then is two G4 towers, one Bondi Blue and one Graphite, the G4 Cube, a white iBook, a G5 Aluminum Tower, 12“ PowerBook, 15” Powerbook, 14“ Black MacBook, Intel Aluminum Tower and currently (as of 2011) a 27”, Mid–2010, Core i5, 2.8 GHz, iMac.
Work Life
Started as a Graphic Designer at Volt IS, but quickly moved on to a similar position at Construction Equipment Guide in November of 1996.
Convinced them in 1999 that I could build a website for them and never looked back. I spent 1999–2010 as their full time web developer and designer, solo until 2006, when I convinced them I needed help.
But in 2010, I realized I could do more and at the same time wanted to be more available for the family, so I left the world of full time employment, much to their dismay and shock, and started Stephen Collins Design. And much to my shock, one year later, I am still making money. Ha.
Realizing that Classic ASP wouldn’t carry me through to retirement decided to add PHP and Python to the skill set and have been quite happy with the change so far.
On the one year anniversary of my departure, I was approached to have a conversation about returning to full time employment. Yeah, I don’t know about that yet…
