Fourth in a series
By Ayo Johnson
Bermuda Sun July 12th 2000
IT WOULD fit anybody’s description of a dream job — roll out of bed, into the living room, fire up a G3 computer and start work.
Illustrator and Web site designer Colin Murdoch has that kind of life — on the face of it.
He and two others — Jennifer Ward and David Hill — started E-media earlier this year with a view to servicing the growing demand for media design services.
No stranger to the world of advertising — he had spent close to 10 years in the print advertising industry as a designer and illustrator. Mr. Murdoch, 30, knows that his business is serious business. The living-room-turned-office in the Cobbs Hill home he shares with partner Ms. Ward is the centre of an operation that has so far added considerable value to half a dozen Bermuda businesses — and is making the pair a good living for themselves.
Today, Mr. Murdoch is known as one of the island’s top Web site designers — a reputation that is growing as an increasing number of island businesses recognize the virtues of E-marketing.
"It was good timing," he told the Bermuda Sun about his decision to enter the market.
The buzz about E-commerce had reached a crescendo when he decided to "solidify" his freelance career and form E-media.
Best described as a multi-media design and illustrating company, E-media’s workload is being rapidly taken over by Web design work.
A year ago, he said, 80 per cent of his design work was for print with a mere 20 per cent for the World Wide Web.
Today the ratio is 50/50. "It’s going to go up," he said with absolute certainty. His estimate is that print design work will dwindle to 30 per cent within a year.
"There are an awful lot of Web sites going up — which is good," he said.
The reason is that building a Web site for your business is often a very sound business decision.
He points to E-media’s latest project — for cosmetic surgeon Dr. Jonathan Murray’s Point Finger Road practice — as an example. "He will laugh to the bank... In terms of returns to investment, he will laugh to the bank," says Murdoch.
"If he gets one person to come to him as a result of the Web site he will have covered costs," adds Ms. Ward, who takes care of marketing, accounts and liaising with clients.
Dr. Murray had decided that the Web was an ideal, cost-effective way to attract clients from overseas.
He left it up to the E-media team to create his site — a month long project that has already yielded positive dividends.
The site is chock full of information about Dr. Murray’s professional qualifications, treatments offered, staff profiles and links to Web sites with information on the field.
Mr. Murdoch told the Bermuda Sun that his is a "classic story. In high school I did really well in art," then it was off to the Bermuda College for a year of art classes.
In 1991, he graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology with a BFA, having studied photography, illustration and printing and mastered a number of Macintosh software tools like Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Freehand.
His summers during the college years were spent working for Tuckers Tees, where he created hundreds of illustrations for the booming tee-shirt business. The experience showed him the ins and outs of the printing process and "helped me figure out what I wanted to do," he said.
After college, he worked for a number of local advertising agencies and built up an impressive freelance portfolio.
The ability to work well in teams is essential to success in the business, he said.
Web design — which pays around $100 an hour for maintenance work or an average of $5,000 to $10,000 per project — is a combination of artistic and technical abilities and it’s not often that one person can excel in both areas, he said.
"Obviously it’s good to have a good artistic or a good technical background. It’s a field you don’t get away with doing everything on your own... Creative people in general are not suited to doing deep-end back coding" and vice versa. But he added one should have a "vague" understanding of the other skill sets.
Standards are high, he noted. A Web site is seen globally so it’s not a question of doing something that’s good enough for one’s local community.
And "there’s fierce competition in the U.S.," adds Ms. Ward.
As more people get Internet savvy and realize the real earning potential of putting such talents to good use, the competition in Bermuda is bound to heat up.