About Cryptid
Ethos
Cryptid is a single developer studio. What you see on this site was coded by hand by one guy. It took me about a week.
I help small businesses get responsive, well-designed websites up and running in a reasonable timeframe.
Too often, small business owners are bombarded by “quick, easy solutions”. Services that market themselves as “build your own free website and we’ll host it for a small fee”. Which sounds great at first, but the final product you wind up with has like 87 plugins and looks awful on a cell phone.
Updates to the site itself are not intuitive at all, and the code is almost incomprehensible because of the amount of dependencies these BYO choices rely on to brand themselves as “quick, easy, and cheap”. One change can break your whole site, and good luck figuring out what broke when your source code looks like wingdings.
You don’t need excessive plugins and frameworks to have a site that looks good. And fewer dependencies means less downtime for updates.
So I’m trying to offer something more sustainable. I will build your website using tools I (and most developers) know how to use. I will document the code really well, and then hand you the keys. If you have a go-to web person, they should be able to understand what I wrote, because I’m writing it to be readable. If you want me to get it hosted for you, I can help with that, too. If you want me to be your web guy afterwards, we can talk about that too.
Couple things I can promise you - I’m not here to give you a hard sell. I’m not here to surprise you with anything. I really enjoy my craft.
I use the same discretion I used when I built trails as I do when I code up a site.
I’m not good with corporate lingo or the culture that goes along with that. The way I’m writing this right now is the way I talk. That’s what you’re getting when you work with me.
At the end of the day, I am sick of seeing everything sold as a subscription or a service that is marketed as cheap and ultimately breaks.
If this resonates with you, reach out to me. No harm in having a conversation. Let’s see if we can make something cool.
Bio
I'm Aiden. And I'm really bad at talking about myself. No like, really bad.
One time I was leading a trail project and some important people from the town came through to meet us. I stuck out my hand and said “I move the rocks.” That was it. They just stared at me. Then we took a publicity photo and I did something really weird with my hands.
My original background was in trail and forestry. Far cry from tech, I know.
Leading crews in the backcountry taught me self-reliance, adaptability, and accountability. It made me a strong communicator, too.
Having been a field leader for years, eating chili out of a can and not bathing for 8 days at a time, my only way up was toward an administrative role. I gave it a shot, I really did, but I just don’t fit in with that culture very well. I knew it was time to move on.
I had the opportunity to go back to school, and I chose to double major in web development and software programming, earning two associates degrees in just over a year. Why tech and not something environmental-science related?
Three reasons:
- You can’t sleep on the ground forever. Believe me, I tried. 6 years was my limit.
- I wanted something that would be challenging, and that would push on both the logical and creative sides of my brain. I found that in dev work.
- The Matrix was my favorite movie as a kid.
So why Cryptid?
I wanted to build something on my own terms, that honors everything I learned from a life in the field, while finally revisiting my passion for design and technology.
Also my crew took a photo of me once. So that’s where the name comes from.