BrowseWorks was born during the Spring of 2008. Emil Atanasov and I (George Alexandrov) founded the company with the main focus on creating powerful web presence through web usability and search engine optimization. At that time we each had four and nine years of experience working on various web projects of small and large scale. Both of us have a natural inclination for employer-independence and free spirits. The next most natural step was to unite our powers in creating our own business so that we could apply our knowledge most creatively and effectively. However, BrowseWorks is not just us two. We strongly believe in the power of cooperation, and we are constantly establishing strategic partnerships with highly qualified professionals.
One of our main concentrations is Usability. Many people are not aware of it, or rather, the lack of it. To quote Wilkipedia's definition, "Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal." Usability, was not a very popular discipline until fairly recently. Fortunately, as people start to realize that good and usable design has a vast impact on the success of their business, the usability field has grown 5000% in the last 25 years. In addition to finding the field very interesting, we believe that there is a lot of work to be done – the web is full of badly designed, hard to use sites. On top of it, due to poor formatting and copy, most of them suffer from poor visibility on the Web – no one can find such website on Google, Yahoo, or any other search engines. Our intention in forming BrowseWorks was to take part in making the web world a better place by fixing bad design!
Let's get back to our history. So how do Emil and I know each other? This goes back to 1998, when we met for the first time during our freshman year at Monmouth College, IL. We were the only international students from Bulgaria on campus and both of us were enrolled in the Computer Science program there. It was amazing how we found each other thousands of miles away from home, in the corn fields of Illinois. We have fond memories of that school! Later on, both of us transferred to Elmhurst College from where we graduated. Later onwe took some of the graduate courses together at DePaul University. Today our journey as best friends in life continues in business as well.
The idea of BrowseWorks, was conceived during the last days of the long 2008 winter. It all happened at the North & Halsted Borders bookstore in Chicago. We even came up with the company name that same day. Emil and I had been contemplating a great business (meaning successful and fun to do) for a few years. We were confident we could do it well, given our similar views on the world and the fact that we work extremely well together. However, due to various life circumstances we could not concentrate our efforts. Emil and his partner had to deal with a move from Chicago to Toronto (that takes years, not a weekend), and I was busy working full-time for a company that was sponsoring my work visa. During that time, Emil had been working on his Web and IT consulting practice in Chicago and, later, Toronto. At the same time I was gaining my valuable experience as a full-time web programmer / project manager at SynNet , a web solutions company out of Elmhurst (suburban Chicago). Finally, in 2008 the situation was ripe for us to act!
BrowseWorks is now a fact and we are marching on!