♠ Mark Beihoffer ♠

Hello, this is Mark Beihoffer here. If you’re looking for an overview of my roles and responsibilities here at Dragonfly Networks, you’ve come to the right place.

As the “Chief Technology Officer”, (ahem), and one of the founding partners of the business, I am tasked with juggling a wide variety of technical projects simultaneously. One of the things I like best about my job is that the projects are technically challenging, but varied enough from day-to-day that I don’t get burnt out on them.

To give you some idea of what I’m talking about, here are some of the projects I’ve done over the last couple months. You may or may not be interested in this list, I suppose, but it’s a decent overview of the types of work I do.

• Finished a major overhaul of the Lunalux letterpress printing studio website.


the Lunalux site redesign

• Consulted on a project for a large national law firm that needed search engine optimization services.
• Set up an online music store for a local songwriter that is sleek, sexy, secure, and easy to use, both for the songwriter, and the people downloading music.


the Jack Merlot music site

• Helped to troubleshoot network connectivity issues that were preventing a client from using their virtual private network.
• Wrote several Perl programs to integrate the services of Twitter and Facebook with the popular WordPress and WordPress MU blogging platforms, and programmed several prototype systems that interfaced Perl’s Catalyst MVC framework with the other projects and platforms we use.
• Worked with a half-dozen of the most highly skilled, talented individuals I could have hoped for, on projects ranging from brand development to secure remote access, on systems ranging from powerful *nix laptops and workstations, to sleek and sophisticated graphical and audio workstations based on Mac OS X, to servers running OpenBSD and FreeBSD.

As if that weren’t enough, I also work for several other companies in various capacities, consulting on projects where I have some expertise, and when I don’t have the right skills for the job, I try to find the people who do.

So, you might ask, that all sounds very complicated, but how does it help me? Perhaps all you need is a simple website, with three or four pages, and you’ve already registered a great domain name and started to design the site in Photoshop. Well, I completely understand. I love Photoshop, and domain names are, like, ten bucks a year now.

In that case, great! You probably don’t need our help after all, then. To be frank, we’re pretty busy here anyways, and are mostly interested in projects that have a budget of $5,000 or more. If you need a website for cheaper than that, you’ve probably come to the wrong place.

For many people and small businesses, a simple website will work just fine, and there are plenty of places (search for “web designers” on Google and you’ll see what I mean) that will build you a site with a logo, a contact form, and three or four pages of information about your business. I’ve seen companies that claim that they can do this for $799.00 (or even cheaper) and I don’t doubt that they can, but sadly, 1.) we’re located in the good old USA, so the cost of living is a little more than it would be if we were in, say, India, and 2.) we’d like to stay in business for another 12 years (and another 12 after that!), and we’d be doing a disservice to our clients if we charged so little that we went out of business.

(Plus, you get what you pay for. There, I said it out loud.)

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I started the business back in 1998, and although the name has changed a little (from Dragonfly Dynamics, to Dragonfly-7, and then finally to Dragonfly Networks in 2001), we’re still in the business of building fantastic websites for businesses and individuals that want to get the most from the web. We may not be the cheapest, but our sites are built on a solid foundation, and the clients that invest their money into projects with us get the absolute best bang for their buck.

They get high-ranking results in the most popular search engines, they get the best software and hardware for their money, they get access to all of the valuable knowledge Dragonfly Networks has accumulated over the years. We make every attempt to come in on-time and under budget, with a success rate of better than 90%. (We’re not perfect, and sometimes we underestimate how much a project will cost, but that’s becoming increasingly rare as we refine our business practices.)

In any case, thank you for taking the time to do some research before you start your next project. If you’ve read this far and still have questions, please feel free to give me a call at (612) 721-9102 or contact us through our handy form.

Sincerely,

Mark Beihoffer

Chief Technology Officer
Dragonfly Networks