In early 1995, a highly evolved and often restless secretary named Eileen Parzek discovered the Internet. It happened one day when the high priest of cyberdom at the NYS DMV summoned her down into the inner sanctum of the building to see something really cool. This cool thing was displayed in the Mosaic browser, and it was gray and ugly, but she immediately understood the implications... here was hypertext and computer graphics together, leading the way to a seemingly endless amount of information available on a world wide network of computers. Life would never be the same again.

Already armed with a weird collection of skills that previously made for no known occupation, Ms. Parzek dashed home intending to find out more. She called up Albany.Net, one of the original ISPs in the area, and asked for an internet connection for her computer. The customer service rep, Bernie, said she had to pick a user name and password. A user name? "Yes, it could be a nickname or something like that," said Bernie. Remembering the nickname she had acquired in highschool, Turtle was born.

Within a week or so, Turtle, using the resources available on the web, had built her first web page and started to put her writing and some images she had drawn with charcoal on the web. On the home page, she drew a picture of a goofy looking turtle in a web (this is version 7 of that site, to put things in perspective and the original turtle lives here). She also immersed herself fully in the existing web design communities (many of which still exist today) and started chatting and corresponding with people all over the world. It was a glorious time... sleep... who needs sleep?

One day while surfing the web (what a quaint term that seems now!), she came across a local web page of a couple of fellows who were designing web pages for local companies. It was rather ugly, and there were typos all over the site, so Turtle wrote an email asking them if they needed help with the design aspects of their site building. The men replied, and they met at Denny's to work out a deal that they would continue landing these projects, and Turtle would do the work, for a fee. Before long, she was staying up all night, and working through every weekend building web sites, while still working during the day at DMV. After a while, there was just too much fun to be had to be bothered with going to work every day, so she quit her job.

More and more work came in, from those two guys and others around the city and the country, and Turtle was very very busy. But, it was at least a year or two before this woman who formerly didn't know how to spell "entrepreneur" realized that she had a business taking off. When it did sink in, she got official about it and named the business Turtle's Web Art & Design.

In those early days, Turtle did "full service" web design - because there really wasn't a whole lot of programming to it. After a while, the field became so complex that Turtle specialized in the area she had the most experience with - that of creative design and information architecture. By partnering with other web development companies and programming consultants, she was able to work on large scale projects, while concentrating on one area of expertise.

Over the years, Turtle's Web evolved into an international virtual business involved in the development of approximately 250 web sites and projects. While remaining located in Albany, NY, Turtle maintained many long-term, long distance clients, and cultivated relationships with web development firms all over the US by becoming an expert in conducting a virtual business and telecommuting.

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