About

Hi, my name is Brad Touesnard. I’m an independent web developer, web designer, and entrepreneur living in Halifax, Canada.
Looking for my resume? Click here.

I was born an entrepreneur. From lemonade stands, to mowing lawns, to making my first dollars online, I’ve always been motivated by entrepreneurship. In June 2002, I cofounded a web hosting company that’s still going strong today. I currently work full time on a new venture started in October 2011 called WP App Store.

Before that, I built web sites for a living. I worked as an independent, most often collaborating with a creative agency or an independent web designer. I hardly ever did design myself because I had too many talented designer friends who were much better at it. But because I can design and have a programming background, my strength lies in frontend web development. Most projects also involved my CMS of choice, WordPress.

I love to travel. Most recently I’ve been a tourist in Cuba, NYC, Boston, New Zealand, Tasmania (Australia), Malaysia, and China. I can hardly wait to visit South America and Eastern Europe.

I grew up in beautiful, rural Cape Breton, Canada. But I find cities wonderful. I’ve lived in both Vancouver and Melbourne. They truly are the most liveable cities on the planet. I miss them both. Today, my wife Carolyn, son Max, and I call Halifax, Canada home.

I love sports. I play beer league hockey in the winter, golf and competitive ultimate frisbee in the summer.

I’ve had a personal web site since 1996 but only started blogging in 2004. This site is now mainly geared toward my professional career, showcasing my work and publishing my original writings about the business of building the web. I share short thoughts on Twitter.

This site is powered by a custom WordPress theme developed in Komodo Edit, running on Zenutech shared web hosting.

Professional Development Timeline

In 2010, I moved back to Canada and continued working as a freelance developer out of my home in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

In 2009, I worked as a freelance web developer based in Melbourne, Australia. In addition to continuing to collaborate with Fjord Interactive on several projects, I worked with Sitepoint to design the user experience of their new startup, volunteered to develop the branding and web site for the Pirate Party of Canada, and launched my own startup file sharing service. Having pumped out five WordPress-powered web sites, I successfully realigned myself as a WordPress specialist.

In 2008, I attended the WDN conference again and won an award as one of the best blog sites of those in attendance. I was encouraged to thrive at Fjord. I quickly became the only frontend developer and the WordPress specialist in the office. With Fjord, I helped push out some high profile sites using Silverstripe and WordPress as a CMS. I blogged about my experiences and gave my first talk at BarCampVancouver2008. I launched my first Facebook application just in time for the Canadian election. In December, I quit my job with Fjord Interactive to move to Australia for a year and do some traveling.

In 2007, I attended a web development conference that really opened my eyes to the enthousiasme and excitement that exists in web development. Having worked on the web for almost ten years, I found new energy to continue what I do. Inspired by a Microformats talk at the conference, I wrote and published my first WordPress plugin. Later that year, I started working for my company and gradually phased out ActiveState. While working for my company, I developed an E-mail Setup Wizard to help new web hosting customers setup their e-mail client, worked on some client projects, and redesigned our web site. Although I was getting lots done, working from home wasn’t for me, and in December, I took a job offer from the fine folks at Fjord Interactive.

In 2006, I developed my first WordPress theme and attended my first developer conference.

In 2005, I earned my Computer Science degree, with a major in Software Systems. I then moved to Vancouver and landed a job with Future Shop as a web designer, working on their large rebranding project. After managing the Best Buy Canada web site for a short while, I landed a job with ActiveState as a web developer. I was the sole web developer in house, but responsible for managing the corporate web site, e-commerce system, software licensing system, customer survey system, internal sales system, and community portal web site. After six months of madness, I convinced management to hire another developer and they eventually let us build a small team. Also in 2005, I released version 2.0 of PHP TreeView, rebranded Zenutech.com and developed a download manager.

In 2004, after evaluating Movable Type and WordPress, I chose WordPress and started this blog.In 2002, Pierre Grandmaison and I started a web hosting company. I built the web site, the billing and invoicing system, and the web hosting control panel.From 2002 to 2005, I did five co-op work terms with reputable organizations National Research Council Canada and Natural Resources Canada.In 2001, at University now, I joined the co-op program and landed my first office job with SmartForce, working with ASP. Inspired by the ASP TreeView component, I developed a PHP TreeView component, did some marketing, and sold over two dozen licenses. The same year, I managed to design and develop a PHP/MySQL powered online community site for my student residence that is still in active use today. Also in 2001, I developed a blogging system for a friend, and a matchmaking site that included an early attempt at creating a social network.In 2000, I redesigned my company web site, built a url shortening service, taught myself PHP 3 by developing a Simpsons Trivia web site, recoded my greeting card web site in PHP, and left the MP3 scene. In addition, I was contracted to develop my high school’s web site, then contracted by a teacher to develop her NSTU presidential campaign web site. This was my first experience with Macromedia Flash 4.
By 1999, in addition to maintaining my MP3 web sites, I had landed my first contract job building a site for the local marina, designed and coded a music greeting card web site in Perl, and setup a company web sitefor my consulting services. Having outgrown the simplistic Paint Shop Pro, I started using Adobe Photoshop.In 1998, I developed a web site featuring the top 30 songs from the MuchMusic Countdown in downloadable MP3 format. The site was quite popular and I managed to make my first dollars online. Curious how web forms worked, that same year I got my first taste of programming by experimenting with Perl scripts from CGI Resources and Matt’s Script Archive.In 1997, I was taught how to hand-code HTML in school. Notepad was my tool and Geocities my web host. In no time, I was creating graphics in Paint Shop Pro 4 and building more complex web sites.