Biography

I have a BS in Economics and a Masters in Marketing Education (1996), both from Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama.  I am very interested in educational reform and the use of technology in k-12 education.

I spent a number of years in Silicon Valley California as a business and technology consultant, working such arenas as desktop publishing, desktop video, animation, graphics, and semiconductor design.  Before that, I was the president, ceo and chairman of the board of Orrox Corporation, in Santa Clara, California, a public company listed on the American Stock Exchange.  We specialized in voice coils to control hard disc drives, quad-head refurbishing of 2” helical scan tape recorders, and video tape editing systems for TV broadcasters and post-production houses.

The latter product, CMX Systems, had the honor, for several years, of being the edit system of choice for 80% of all television programs originating on videotape.  This business took me on sales and public relations visits to every leading television and film production center in Canada, the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, Mexico, China and Japan. Of course, I visited television production centers in the U.S. as well.  Our systems sold for between $50,000 and $300,000.  I have to admit, meeting famous directors and film visionaries like Francis Ford Coppola and Stanley Kubrick was a lot of fun.  Even more fun was that we attained an 80% market share with a 50% pre tax margin.

I have been on the Internet since 1993, first, with e-mail, Telnet, Archie and Veronica working as a graduate assistant at Auburn University. Web work started in 1995, writing some HTML and creating a web site for educational instruction theory, practice, and educational technology resources.  I decided early on that I did not want to be a web designer, although that was where most of the money is made.  I didn’t feel that I had the creative ability to handle that very demanding end of the business.

Under the aegis of WilliamOrr.Com, I began my web consulting business in May of 1999.  My opening hypothesis was the same then as it is now; that 80% of all web sites need a better header behind their home pages and a better job on registrations with the search engine and web directory community.  The idea, almost from the start, was that I would work for web designers, composing headers and doing manual registrations for their clients; except for one direct client, my SEO business is still through designers.

My consulting background in a variety of industries has made it generally unnecessary to involve web site owners when defining key words and key phrases.  I can explore client web sites as well as their competition and efficiently arrive at the right words for headers.  During the last two years, the web has taken an interesting turn into e-commerce marketing for a variety of products and services.  This fits right in with my search engine optimization business, and I applaud this expansion of the market. People are getting more and more serious about their e-business prospects; that works very well for me.

Bill Orr
bill@williamorr.com
March 2004