G.L. Marshall Portfolio: The Ghosts in the Machine

Chrysler Museum
of Art

You can't see the carousels at work here, but any time I hear people saying carousels don't work, that people only click the first slide, my head explodes. I optimized this home page carousel for five years. Want an effective way to get maximum impact in minimum space? I can tell you the three rules.

The information architecture on this site was just rock-solid and the extensible design made it incredibly easy to gather data on user interests.

I was hired to do the technical work in redesigning and launching this new version of the web site. My job got more content-focused over time, with not only the web page but social media and email, too.

There's one particular part of this job of which I remain incredibly proud to this day. The assignment was how to keep people interested in an art museum when that museum was closed for renovations.

Norfolk, Va.
2010-2017

The ad for this job said five or six different technologies were required. My cover letter said that wasn't a list of requirements — that was the problem. I advocated radical simplification and a total rethink, and I went from applicant to employee in a matter of days.

For full-size screenshots of the home page and inside page sample, click here and here.

IFMG / Carloan.com

My teammates were fantastic, and with all due respect for lots of co-workers along the way, this was probably the strongest group of colleagues at any stop on my career.

I won't bore you with IP "C" blocks or link juice. I won't trouble you with how I went against conventional wisdom (HTML absolute positioning) to achieve cross-browser compatibility and crazy-high levels of production. I won't brag, even though I'd really like to, on a terrific bit of long-tail keywording and a highly successful email drip campaign before the term "drip campaign" was even invented.

No, I'll just put in a number. When the car industry was crumbling in a recession, with sales down 35 percent, my lead generation numbers were up 35 percent. In a really tough time, I delivered.

In a longer setting, I'd have two other stories of note, including one that involves a covered-up data breach that I made sure got uncovered.

The second involves what athlletes call "Scoreboard!" IFMG was bought up by a conglomerate and as you would expect, a new management team made changes. So all I'll say is that while I was there, carloan.com saw 57,000 visitors a month. Within a few years, it was down to 2,000. That's a Quantcast chart I kept. It's quite a souvenir.

Richmond, Va.
2006-2010

Yes, I lived in one city and worked in another. I saw a lot of I-64, U.S. 460, and tail lights stacking up in the distance.

TargetEm

Back when search engine marketing was at its peak, no matter how good you were, you couldn't make guarantees.

We made guarantees. Lived up to them, too.

Eventually a lot of SEO companies figured out it was more profitable to cheat than to do the careful, precise work I was doing.

There was plenty of advertiser grumbling at Google back in the day when terms like "Florida algo" meant something, but here's the deal. All you had to do was put things where the Google spider expected to find them. And not cheat.

Nowadays you find "SEO packs" for developers and other ways to get rid of people like me, but I don't believe I'm so easily replaceable by a machine. Three times in my career I've landed a job/gig because someone found me via a search engine.

Since the company is long gone, the story can now be told. I quit this job five minutes before I was going to get fired. Nothing personal and no hard feelings, as I've had multiple experiences with serial entrepreneurs. They are a distinct personality type, and sometimes you just have to go. I wish him well. He just drove me crazy.

Norfolk, Va.
2005-2006

An office in the beautiful Monticello Arcade, and a chance to work in one of Virginia's most successful downtowns.

Skycasters

Total search engine domination that, thanks to technological improvements from Google, will likely never be replicated.

This is a story of what looked like three different companies dominating a crazy number of combinations for four keywords: "Broadband satellite Internet access."

Most times, these three companies, depending on the combo of keywords, would receive double entries in Google results. On the one site we could never bump out of the Top 10, we bought a huge home page ad.

The end result was a routine coverage of seven of the top 10 search results, enough to power a company with multiple millions in sales each year.

This company is now run out of Akron, Ohio. The partners were squabbling while I was there, and I followed one partner to TargetEm, listed above.

Virginia Beach
2004-2005

A low-rent, crummy office added to a rooftop ala something in Bangladesh. First day in the office, I spent the morning cleaning the kitchenette/coffee area, a message to the boiler room folks that, sorry, the standards had just gone up.

Information Architecture

Two projects discussed with pride.

I was doing information architecture before O'Reilly published the book on it. It always just made sense to me to anticipate how people would look for things on a website, and to make that information easy to find.

Two rules came to me early, and largely guide what I do to this day. That which is organized logically should be organized visually, and people need to get to their destination in three clicks or less.

Shown at top was a portal for the Virginia judicial system, illustrated with my photos of courthouses from across the commonwealth. Shown below is a graphic from my deliverable at Capital One. That intranet wound up being named one of the top 10 in the world by usability guru Jakob Nielsen.

Richmond, Va.

One job was a suit-and-tie everyday assignment in downtown Richmond, the other was a classic suburban IT sort of job.

Out in IT land, in an era of uniform khakis and solid-color knit shirts, an uptight business rival once saw me entering a meeting and said, increduously: "Is that a Hawaiian shirt?"

"No," I replied. "I got it in North Carolina."

Reynolds Metals

You know how politicians and economists want to talk about mergers and acquisitions being a good thing, a free-market positive? Well, in my experience, in just one city, I saw far more jobs destoyed than created.

First, the important stuff: Pat and Betty were real. I was in the same building as the home economists and their test kitchen.

Second, if you're a freelancer, there's no better validation on the quality of your work than being asked to come back and do more. All told, I did five projects for Reynolds before calling it a wrap. Sorry, couldn't resist.

My time here coincided with the era of hotshot Web imagineers, scooter riders in hip Dexter glasses who were going to show all the rubes how the Internet was going to change everything. And so it came to pass that I once had the opportunity to watch a pitch presentation by a team of these walking cliches.

Unbeknownst to the visitors from New York City, the CEO was in the audience, sitting a couple rows in front of me. And about halfway through, he whispered to my boss: "You can do whatever you want, but we are never doing business with these assholes."

My very next job was with one of those national, hotshot companies. Life works that way, sometimes.

Richmond, Va.

An office furniture company, I believe it was SteelCase, was testing individual silos, little worker pods, and I volunteered to be a guinea pig. It was like stepping into a big sewer pipe standing on its cylinder end. These individual workspaces were climate-controlled, light-controlled, and even had a clever little whiteboard on the back of the sliding, rounded door. It was just great but was probably way too tiny for the American mass market. It was the perfect environment for the CD I was wearing out at the time, Radiohead's OK Computer.

Xperts

What an introduction to engineers, to the beauty of math, to the elegance of minimized code. I turned a technical writer job into a new career, and thoroughly enjoyed being surrounded by brilliant people.

I learned the web from engineers, not designers, and that made a lasting impression.

When I started there were an estimated 10,000 websites in the world. Our company web address even needed a tilde to work.

I did 20 all-nighters the first year and in the second I billed more hours than anyone in the company. The reason for the all-nighters was simple: If I didn't know how to do something, I'd lie about it, and then study it until I figured it out. No surprise, I guess, that in 20 years of IT work, I'm exactly one day of paid training away from saying I'm completely self-taught.

My specialties at the time were download optimization (building pages that loaded quickly on squawking modems) and being the adult in a field with a lot of youngsters. I also left some great bits of writing behind. We once landed a contract because a guy loved the way I'd written our legal disclaimers page. The headline, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, was a reference to a never-ending lawsuit in a novel by Charles Dickens.

Richmond, Va.

For most of my stint here, I strolled the cozy/quirky Carytown neighborhood on my walk to work. This was just a great time to be alive. The Internet was going to change everything, you know.

War Story

A bonus story from my days in news starts with a clipping from a paper in Singapore.

There are a lot of possible highlights from my news career, including yelling questions at presidents and witnessing an execution, but my favorite single moment was interviewing Charles Schulz. He was as kind and friendly as his famous comic strip, and he seemed to appreciate that at least one reporter in the world believed real news could occur on the funny pages.

Now of course there was a catch to Charlie Brown being a hero, but I don't talk about it anymore. There's so much joy in that sketch of a cartwheeling kid, I see no reason to bring up the asterisk. In a way, we're all Charlie Brown, so here's to your moment, kid. You're a hero, Charlie Brown.

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