Hi. I'm Sheri Meyers, and PixelSmith is me: a graphic designer with eleven years of agency experience, a fast computer, a good scanner and a spare bedroom on the north side of Columbus. I build clean, quick, honest home pages for small businesses. The bakery, the plumber, the bed and breakfast, the accountant, the bike shop: the businesses that keep a town running, and that the big Web firms downtown don't call back.

Here's what I believe. In 1999 your customers are starting to look for you on the Web before they look in the Yellow Pages. They want to know three things: what you do, when you're open, and how to reach you. If they can find those in fifteen seconds, you have a customer. If they find a spinning logo and a song, you've lost one. I build the first kind of page.

• Design and build your home page and the pages behind it, in plain HTML written by hand, so it's small, quick, and works in every browser your customers own.
• Help you with the words. I sat across a desk from copywriters for eleven years, and some of it rubbed off.
• Clean up your logo and make small, sharp graphics in your own colors.
• Scan your photographs and make them small enough to load fast without turning to mud.
• Register a .com name for your business and set up an e-mail address to match.
• List your pages with the search engines and directories: AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, Yahoo! and the rest.
• Keep it all up to date, every month or whenever your prices change.

Every page I build is checked in Netscape Navigator 4 and Internet Explorer 4 and 5, on Windows 95 and 98, at 800 by 600, which is what most people have now, and at 640 by 480, because your customers' computers are older than yours. Home pages stay under 40K, which is about fifteen seconds on a 28.8 modem and less on a 56K. I write the HTML by hand in a plain text editor, so there's no mystery program standing between you and your pages, and anyone who knows HTML can take care of them after me.

I'm 34. For eleven years I designed newspaper ads, brochures, direct mail and the occasional billboard for an advertising agency downtown. In the fall of 1998 the agency lost its two biggest accounts in the same month, and twelve of us lost our jobs in the same afternoon.

I took my severance, a stack of library books and a lot of View Source, and spent the winter learning how pages are built: taking apart the ones I liked, and the ones I didn't, to see why. PixelSmith opened for business in March. I've never been busier, and I've never had a shorter commute.

Why is a web designer on a free page? Because I want you to see what can be done with one. A good page doesn't need an expensive address. It needs to be clear, quick and correct.

Still deciding whether your business needs a page at all? Read Before You Put Your Store on the Web: twelve questions a hardware store owner wishes he'd asked before he put the family store on the Web, and fourteen months of honest results. Then read my ten questions for whoever you hire, including me.