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About William Harrel

William Harrel,
Writer, Editor, Designer -

www.williamharrel.com

William Harrel has over twenty years experience in communications and computer technology. As owner/operator of The Write Desktop Publisher for the past 20 years, he was one of the pioneers in designing print media on computers, a craft known way back then as desktop publishing. In addition to running his own design firm, he has also authored or coauthored 18 books on designing both print media and electronic documents, such as slide and multimedia presentations, on computers—including titles on Photoshop, Acrobat (Acrobat for Dummies), PageMaker, Director, and several other graphics and publishing packages.

He has also written hundreds of magazine articles, ranging in subject from PC and other hardware reviews, to all types of software packages, including page layout, graphics, multimedia, and word processing, in such notable magazines as PC World, Home Office Computing, Compute, Windows Magazine, Publish, Entrepreneur, Home Office, and many, many others.

In 1996 Harrel started an Internet Service Provider (ISP), again making him one of the pioneers in an emerging computer communications medium. The ISP, dock.net, evolved into a multi-million dollar enterprise with offices on both the West and East Coasts and customers all over the World. The dock.net experience allowed him to follow Internet technology from its early stages of dialup and T1s, through the DSL era and on to fiber optics and Voice over IP (VoIP or digital phone).

In June of 2008, dock.net sold to a much larger competitor. The 12 years experience as an ISP owner allowed Harrel to keep his finger on the racing pulse of the Internet business, and out in front of the greased-lightning-pace of ever-changing Internet technology and Internet business trends, including, Web hosting, broadband, and VoIP technologies, such as Hosted PBX (sometimes called VirtualPBX).

Today, based in Southern California, he is again working as a freelance writer and designer, focusing on communications technology.