About Latitude 17 South

I'm Rick Eisenbart, and I founded Latitude 17 South in 2007. This is a freelance business and a sole proprietorship based just outside of Atlanta, Georgia.

This company, and the practice of web design and development in general, represents a career change for me. I spent 17 years as a wildlife biologist and environmental consultant in the desert and coastal regions of the southwest US. For 9 of those years, I was self-employed working on a contract basis with various clients such as Level 3 Communications, San Diego Gas & Electric, and Southern California Gas Company. The work was very enjoyable, but living in hotel rooms for months at a time, and spending 12+ hours per day in the desert sun were not things that I saw myself doing for the remainder of my career. For years I've wanted to do something more creative, and something that I would be physically able to do during the latter years of my career.

I began studying web design and building websites and newspaper layouts on my own in 2006. It quickly became clear that I needed formal training, so in early 2007 I enrolled in the Kennesaw Internet Professional program at Kennesaw State University. The program provided me with skills in Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Javascript, MySQL databases, HTML/XHTML, and CSS. I began doing freelance work in August of 2007, and the workload has been steadily increasing ever since. Although the KIP program concluded in December of 2007 my education is ongoing, and I've been strengthening my PHP skills to include the production of Content Management Systems (CMS). If you'd like to view my resume, it's available here.

I hand-code all my sites myself; they're not from templates, and they're entirely CSS-based and fully validated (according to the World Wide Web Consortium [W3C] standards). You'll find those are rare qualities in today's websites. If you're using Firefox as your browser, you can see how most sites are not working as designed (ie, they're running in "quirks mode"). You won't have that problem with Latitude 17 South!

You'll find that my 17 years of professional consulting and project management experience, coupled with a strong sense of personal and professional integrity, along with hand-coding of CSS-based websites that are compliant with W3C standards, is a very powerful combination. Customer service is second-nature to me. I'm completely confident that I can help you establish, or update, your web presence.

Let's talk about what I can do for you. Contact me!