Alan Smith's professional experience with digital technologies began when he was Communications Manager for a 40-person telecommunications and emergency network department at a major medical center (400-bed hospital, clinic and medical school) in Northern New England. Since then he developed his skills and thinking about technology and information architecture in a variety of academic and private sector settings. In the past five years, he has worked as an interactive designer and developer through his own studio (Concerto Designs) as well for other agencies and companies. As a web generalist, his two major areas of focus are: interactive designs that optimize and enhance User Experience while facilitating the flow of information; and Open Source CMS/ECM/Ecommerce platforms (e.g. Joomla!, Drupal, Wordpress, Magento). He learned advanced SEO techniques under Michael Given (Karma Marketing & Media), and has developed strong skills in css-based layouts, php templates, and Actionscript 3 (Flash) projects. He has built a large number of CMS sites and is passionate about web standards, typography and quality coding.

Alan earned his PhD in Comparative literature at Cornell University. He is fluent in several languages and has widely published on scholarly topics. He met his wife Jessica in graduate school. They have three daughters and the whole family enjoys hiking, watching film noir, volunteering at Saint Mark's Cathedral, and making music on all sorts of instruments.