Web designer Mark Czerniec
Hello, I’m Mark Czerniec (pronounced “SER-nik”), a web designer building small business websites in Racine and Kenosha, Wisconsin, the greater Chicago–Milwaukee area, and beyond.Using technology and media to share stories with an audience has delighted me since I was a kid. I was thrilled when the World Wide Web appeared in 1995 — a brilliant system allowing us to create and publish anything we can dream up at a very low cost.
Kenosha-Racine web designer since 1996
The first website I built — a guide to Kenosha, Wisconsin — went online in March of 1996, just as the general public was beginning to use the web. Almost immediately, I found myself communicating with people all over the world. Some were Kenoshans living in Tokyo and Addis Ababa. Others were former Italian soldiers looking for old comrades back here.
My website served as Kenosha’s unofficial online chamber of commerce before the real Kenosha Area Chamber of Commerce ever built a website — and long before the terms “search engine optimization” or “local SEO” were coined.Soon, businesses began paying me to design websites for them. When the Kenosha News started to develop its online presence, the paper hired me as a consultant to train its staffers in website design basics.I have continued to develop and maintain a variety of small business website projects over the past 27 years. My clients are in the greater Milwaukee-Chicago area, as well as other parts of the United States.
“Mark from Kenosha”
Before the web, the medium I loved best was radio. One personality who really sparked my imagination as a young adult was Chicago radio legend Steve Dahl.In 1981, I began haunting the WLS-FM show Steve did with Garry Meier as a mysterious caller. I phoned in wacky tape creations I had edited together.This turned into a daily job as the Steve and Garry Show’s “All My Children Update” correspondent, “Mark from Kenosha,” from 1982 to 1986. We talked about Kenosha regularly, and soon Kenosha began showing up on Chicago TV weather maps.
A number of other commercial and public radio jobs followed. I worked for WLS and WGN in Chicago, as well as WGTD and WLIP in Kenosha. Eventually I returned to work for Steve Dahl at WCKG — on the afternoon of September 11, 2001.In order to be better-connected after the terrorist attacks that day, Steve hired me to monitor news, surf the internet, and do research for his show behind the scenes while he was on the air.
Employed by CBS Radio while telecommuting from my home office in Wisconsin (plus occasional show trips to Hawaii and Mexico), I became The Steve Dahl Show‘s information director for the next seven years — and redesigned its website as well. After a long and legendary run, the show was canceled at WJMK in December of 2008.Since then, I have immersed myself exclusively in online media, and have been helping small businesses, entrepreneurs, educational institutions, professional practices, authors, and other individuals use custom websites to reach wider audiences.