Waaaaaay back in 1999 I started a small consulting business.  I mostly did teaching of web related courses, html, dreamweaver and some javascript.  Ah… good times.  Man… back in 1999 I remember teaching the <font> tag and using tables for layout!  Yikes…. how far we’ve come.  The small business took on the name of “Dark Horse Consulting” because I really liked the metaphor of the dark horse.  If you aren’t familiar with it, I quoteth wikipedia:

A dark horse candidate is one who is nominated unexpectedly, without previously having been discussed or considered as a likely choice. Often a dark horse is selected as a compromise when other, more prominent candidates’ factions cannot come to an agreement. This metaphoric expression originally alluded to an unknown horse winning a race and was so used in a novel by Benjamin Disraeli (The Young Duke, 1831).

Unfortunately many people thought it meant “black stallion”, which is completely beyond me… but anyways, the name took off, and now its part of my day-to-day identity whether I like it or not.  The domain darkhorse.com was owned by Dark Horse Comics, who had been around much longer then my fledgling company.  darkhorse.ca seemed an obvious choice, and was available at the time, but in 1999 I couldn’t get a .ca domain without operating in at least two provinces.  I didn’t really like the idea of darkhorse.on.ca, so I went with something else that I thought was memorable, a .to top level domain - since I operated (and still do) out of Toronto.  Technically its the country code for Tonga… but let’s not concern ourselves with these tiny details ok.

The “little business that could” kept on rolling, and by 2001 I had an honest to goodness company on my hands.  A few employees, a steady list of clients… things were good.  Since most of my business was in teaching, so I wasn’t hit much (actually, at all) by the “dot com bust”.  The business site has gone through many iterations, some much better then others, but about 3 months ago I lost all my non-textual assets, and decided to use it as an excuse to rebuild.

Finally today, I release the result onto the world

The paint isn’t dry yet, and there are still many more things to do, but its still much better then the bastardized site that was up there.  I’d love to hear your thoughts, criticisms or insights into the new look.

edit (March 24): Hmm… I notice now that the footer looks a bit off (squished) in Safari… it was fine during my initial test builds… but I must have messed something up (sigh…)  Apologies to any Mac/Safari users out there… I’ll get that fixed up shortly.

edit (March 25): OK, fixed the footer in Safari.  Oddly, the solution was to add an explicit width to the footer of 100%.  The odd thing is that the footer is is a div, which by default is a block-level element, which by default is 100% width.  I must have somehow over-rode the settings, or encountered a Safari bug I’m not familiar with.