Goodbye 2009. Goodbye Sherwood Web Design.

A few years ago, I fancied myself a freelance web designer. After all, I’ve been designing websites since 1996 or so, back in the days before the Mosaic browser could even support graphics.

Remember Mosaic? Pre-graphical internet? Lynx?

No?

Get off my lawn.

Then along came Flash and CMS and all kinds of other things that I simply didn’t keep up with.

I still do web design work. In fact, that’s one of my main duties at the job that pays the bills. But, I don’t freelance so much anymore. I do take care of websites for friends, but that’s about it.

Many years ago, I worked under the name Simplicity Web Design because I kept my designs simple. Simple to navigate. Simple to maintain. Someone else registered the name, so I decided to find another. The inspiration came during a visit to my hometown of Plainville, Connecticut.

Years before I was born (I’m not that old, but you still need to get off my lawn), THE phone company used lettered prefixes for phone numbers. For instance, if your prefix (that’s the first 3 digits after the area code, kids) starts with 7-4 like Plainville’s did, they’d choose letters that were on the telephone’s rotary dial (lawn – off!) for the prefix. In Plainville’s case, they choose S-H.

Maybe you’ve heard actors in old movies who would pick up a phone and connect directly to the operator. They’d ask for “Klondike-5″ followed by the last 4 digits of the number. It was “Klondike” because the prefix was actually “5-5-5″ and they chose “K-L” for the letter designation. “K-L” lead to “KLondike”. Get it?

Well, in Plainville’s case, “S-H” lead to “SHerwood”. As a result, we had places like Sherwood Cleaners (which still exists) and Sherwood Pharmacy (which closed decades ago).

And that’s how Simplicity Web Design became Sherwood Web Design.

Since I no longer do a lot of freelance work and I decided to let the company go, I stopped identifying myself as “Sherwood Web Design” in 2009.

Today, my domain registration for SherwoodWebDesign.com expired. I can no longer renew it. It will soon be released to the public for anyone to register. Even though I hold the trademark on the name both in Arizona and in the United States, if someone decides to pick up the name and use it for an actual web design business, I won’t fight it. Use it for porn or some other non web design related use, and I just might.

Anyway, Sherwood Web Design is history now, just like 2009. While I bid good riddance to the latter, I bid a fond farewell to the former.

Onward to other dreams.

So, to recap…

2009 sucks.

At least the first half sucked. It sucked rocks. Enormous, crusty, jagged freakin’ rocks.

I finally set up a savings plan through my workplace, and the stock market tanks taking a chunk of that savings with it.

My office puts together a collaboration with another agency, something we’d dreamed of doing for a long time, and the other agency ends up scaling back. The collaboration still goes through, but not without people losing their jobs.

But the biggie… I finally got 3 weeks worth of time off in one big chunk… to attend my mother’s funeral and help my brothers sort through decades of history in her house.

The theme for this year so far has been summed up nicely for me by many friends in one simple word: bittersweet. Very little that’s been even a tiny bit good has come without it’s horrid side so far.

Yes, there’s light at the end of the tunnel that is 2009. But is it a way out or an oncoming train?

Stay tuned.