I’ll be a first to tell you that I’m terrible at biographies. Especially autobiographies. But now that you ask…

I’m Chris Voll, a junior at Liverpool High School. I started this Web development business in April of 2008, and have been working with varying clients from across North America ever since, and I’ll be completely honest: I love what I’m doing. I’ve learned HTML, JavaScript, CSS and PHP over a period of several years, starting a number of personal projects in that time period to further gain experience. If you want to learn more about how and why I got started with that, I wrote about how others can get started with self-employment in The Syracuse Post-Standard.

I’m a Geek. Not a hardcore geek, but it’s enough to get by. I do all of my work on Apple’s beautiful MacBook notebook (replacing a prized three-year-old iMac), designing in Photoshop, and dabbling in a number of different text editors here and there for coding. I do writing in Pages, keep track of tasks with The Hit List, browse feeds with NetNewsWire and tweet (or twitter, whichever verb floats your proverbial boat) with Tweetie.

Aside from life on the computer, I also watch a lot of sci-fi. I’m a fan of old franchises like Star Trek and Stargate, but also budding series like Sanctuary and Eureka.

I also record a twice-monthly podcast called Tada with two of my good friends (who I also have to keep in line during recording), David Owens and Nikki Papadopoulos. The show features insight into issues interesting to teens, along with opinions and ideas from occasional guests. The geek part? Well, I made the Website and usually edit and publish all of the episodes. Us three have also hosted a couple of seminars to teach educators how to create their own podcasts for classroom use.

I do other things, too. I have recently taken up photography as a hobby (what can I say? Since Web design is my job, can it really still be considered a hobby? Something had to replace it). In August 2008, I bought my first DSLR, a Canon XTi with the kit 18-55mm lens, and then a 55-250mm telephoto lens. All of my favorite photos are on my Flickr page.

I’m in my school’s select choir group, Concert Chorale. Some of my best high school memories so far have come out of there, and I wouldn’t give it up for the world. I’ve also taken a number of technology courses, the most recent of which focus on media.

I’ve written several times now for the Voices section of The Syracuse Post-Standard. I started off as one of the original writers of the teen-driven section when I was in seventh grade (before it even had its own page), where I mused about my experience of getting braces (to sum it up: it wasn’t as bad as you’d think it would be).

Well, now you know a bit more about me. Go right ahead and peruse the other sections of the site as long as you’d like, and drop me a line at chris@chrisvoll.com if you have any questions or job inquiries, or want to make a comment on one of my weblog posts.