My Story

Photo of Tony McCreath

OK, my real name is Anthony James McCreath but I only get called that when I'm naughty. Some call me The Glorious and Fabulous SEO Giant (well one guy did). I currently live in Adelaide, Australia where I own Web Site Advantage.

At the age of 16, home computers had just come out in England and I was already making money writing software for local businesses!

I was the first to take a computer exam in my school and a year later I was helping in their first computer classes. It's not all geeky times though, the gatherings and parties at my house had a good reputation.

My first real job was for a telecommunications company who sponsored me through University. At one point I was developing TCP/IP software, the protocol that is the backbone of the internet.

By the time the internet had given birth to the World Wide Web I had changed company and was developing the first GSM mobile phone exchanges. Our test phones were the size of briefcases!

This job took me to Dallas Texas where I worked with some of the most respected software engineers in the company. Here we developed a new software architecture for their mobile phone exchanges. It was a bit like working for NASA, just in shorts and t-shirts.

Then I decided to have a sabbatical to visit home and travel Europe, Africa and Central America. This finally ending up in Adelaide, Australia, where I live today.

My professional website development started here. I joined a small company and we created fully customisable websites based on a content management system (CMS), which I developed.

My move to optimising websites happened in 2004, after accidentally breaking a client website for a few hours. I decided to make up for it by increasing their sales, so I research how to do it. That was when I realised how much we could help our clients, by attracting more visitors to their website. The client was so happy with the results that I was rewarded with a free trip to Sydney!

I continued to research and apply that knowledge to improve my clients' websites. Another client stated that we had turned their website from zero to generating millions of dollars of sales a year; turning the website into one of their main sources of income.

I eventually reached the point where I wanted to focus on website optimisation and internet marketing, so I decided to go it alone.

This started with helping many small local business. I bumped into a few client using BigCommerce, akd that slowly lead me to specialise in BigCommerce SEO with a growing number of my clients being on that platform.

I hired a friend (Brad) to expand on our BigCommerce side of the business and we created more formal procedures and packages to keep up with the work.

We wanted to automate more so we could help more clients without needing to expand as a business, so I started to develop a BigCommerce app. This went down well so I developed a second one. Not long after the second app we decided to fully focus on the app, we stopped providing consultation work and I dropped all my none BigCommerce clients.

And that's where we are today. A BigCommerce App company.

Resume

If you made it here then you may also be interested in a more formal resume of my career.