What I Do Now
I currently work for Living Color Garden Center and its sister nursery Black Olive East Nursery in Fort Lauderdale where I manage their websites and do a variety of things to help them promote their businesses. In addition to developing and maintaining their web sites, I create newspaper and magazine ads, I design signage, maps and sales banners and I regularly design and send out “email blasts” to publicize sales events at the garden center.
I also do quite a bit of photography for them. I photograph their plants, flowers, pottery and fountains and upload them to their websites or incorporate them into ads. I am currently developing an online shopping cart to sell plants and garden accessories via the internet. I’ve also helped build an email list which exceeds 6,000 customers.
At Black Olive East Nursery, a 22 acre wholesale nursery, I designed a website that provides plant information and photographs for over 1200 varieties of plants. I also developed a print-based price list that our salespeople use to check prices for customers as they find plant material. This wholesale price list is available to our customers online. If they register, they can print the price list directly from our website.
How I Got To This Point
About 6 years ago, I became fascinated by the internet as a communication tool and left the training and development field to study web design and video production. Because I had operated a gardening business for 10 years and spent four years at the Miami-Dade County Park and Recreation Department, I developed a love for our natural environment.
It’s became somewhat of a mission of mine to use my web design, photography and video production skills to help people to (re)connect with our natural environment. I started my own business and called it “Floramultimedia” to capture this merging of nature and technology. I decided to focus primarily on the “green industry” (garden centers, nurseries, landscapers, etc.) and I took my first job at Flamingo Road Nursery in Davie, Florida.
Since then, I’ve designed and developed websites for Landscape Solutions in Oakland Park and the two companies I mentioned above.
Where I’d Like To Go From Here
I plan to continue working for garden centers and nurseries, but I would like to expand my experience into creating websites and multimedia for organizations that provide natural experiences to communities such as parks departments and botanical gardens. I’m currently building a website that will allow visitors to take a “virtual tour” of the Toronto Music Garden through photography and sound. The collection of software applications I am integrating will enable me to create similar interactive online experiences for any kind of park or botanical garden in the world.