About Me
Where it all began.
It was a dark and stormy night...
OK, ok… it wasn’t a dark and stormy night… The truth is that I came up with the name of my company (ONNA) sitting at a bar with a friend on a lovely spring day. After a few beers, I turned to my friend and said, “I want an acronym for my business name.” and it went downhill FAST from there. LOL!
My friend’s suggestions were highly inappropriate, to say the least, but that’s when I started thinking…
About the time I was learning to design and code websites, Microsoft came out with a WYSIWYG HTML editor called FrontPage, which was part of the Microsoft Office Suite. WYSIWYG stands for “What you see is what you get” – meaning that the code isn’t visible and you “see” what the web page looks like as you’re building it – making it possible for novices to create web pages quickly and easily.
(I can honestly say that I never learned how to use FrontPage because I was learning to code from scratch using CSS, which was relatively new at the time, and HTML. (CSS stands for “cascading style sheets” and revolutionized the way we style web pages today… but I won’t bore you with those details.))
Needless to say, EVERYONE decided that they were going to become a web designer. I mean, how hard can it be with now that there was a program that did the coding for you!?!? Just slap together a few images, throw in some copy, and you’ve got yourself a website. Of course, it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
What I finally came up with is “ONNA”, which actually stands for “Oh No Not Another” … web designer. *sigh… I know, I know… but it was really funny at the time! It also turns out, ONNA means “female” in Japanese – which is very apropos.
And the hornet in my logo? As a former landscaper, I’ve always had an affinity for bees, hornets, and wasps, so when it came time to come up with a slogan I went with: “Taking the STING out of getting your business online.” – I know, I know… that’s a bit corny too!
So here I am, 20+ years later, still building websites. The world of web design has changed a LOT since I started but I’ve managed to (mostly) keep up. There’s still a lot of things I don’t know (don’t ask me to do complicated javascript or PHP), things I don’t care to know (I won’t touch WIX, Squarespace, or Social Media of any kind), and things I’ve already forgotten (must be the wine) but I still offer websites that are affordable, easily navigable, responsive and quick loading.
ONNA images from the past.
