About Margaret's Folly
Margaret E. Tehan of Margaret's Folly, LLC is a Connecticut website designer who specializes in gorgeous websites, responsive web design and search engine optimization. Websites need more than just great search engine placement. Once found via search, your potential customers need to like what they see... they need to see a website with a good visual presentation that will create a lasting impression. Your website's design needs to be appealing so that people will click on the links and explore all that you and your company have to offer. What good is a website that places high in search engine results if the website doesn't invite the customer to learn more about your company? And vice versa... what good is a beautiful and inviting website if it can't be found?
Margaret Tehan specializes in:
responsive website design for computers, smart phones, iPhones, tablets, iPads, and smart TVs
retina-ready website design that looks crystal clear on the new retina display devices
blog design
graphic design – logos, brochures, business cards, etc.
mobile website design
search engine optimization (SEO) and copywriting
e-commerce and
photography
What does that mean for you? It means that Margaret’s Folly is a one-stop shop for your online marketing needs… website design… development… search engine optimization and search engine marketing… it’s all wrapped up in one little website design package in Guilford, CT.
About Margaret
While attending school at Southern CT State University in 2003, Margaret Tehan began her career as a freelance graphic designer in the greater Waterbury, Connecticut area. Her clients included the Waterbury, CT Chamber of Commerce, the Greater Waterbury Visitors & Convention Bureau, the Mattatuck Museum, Drescher’s Restaurant and the John Bale Book Shop. While attending Southern CT State U, Margaret’s goal was to obtain a degree in Fine Art with a dual concentration in printmaking and graphic art. Alas, Southern CT did not allow dual concentrations. Margaret chose printmaking as her concentration but took every elective offered in graphic art. She couldn’t have picked a better time to study graphic art. In the late 1990s, the Internet was exploding and Margaret took courses in website design and motion graphics (Flash animation and Adobe AfterEffects).
Simultaneously, Margaret received a grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and Hartford, Connecticut’s Institute for Community Research. This grant program, currently known as the Urban Artists Initiative, enabled artists living in Connecticut’s major cities to develop as artists… to learn the business side of art. The recipients attended weeks of training… learning budgeting, grant writing, self-promotion, and many other important skills that artists rarely learn in art school. Each recipient was matched with a mentor for two consecutive years and received a $250 grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts for three consecutive years. Margaret invested wisely. She purchased a scanner and was matched with a web site programmer.
Between the mentor, her studies at Southern CT State University, and teaching herself website design through various books on the topic, Margaret quickly learned how to design websites using standards-based XHTML and CSS and how to animate using Flash and Adobe AfterEffects. Her first website, for Connecticut cartoonist Bob Weber, Jr.’s Slylock Fox & Comics for Kids, won an award from About.com only three weeks after its launch in March of 1999. It garnered several other awards for Margaret’s Folly throughout 1999 including an Educational Best Bet award from USA Today while Margaret continued to freelance for King Features Syndicate.
Upon graduation from Southern CT State University in 2002, Margaret continued to freelance on a part-time basis as a website designer and graphic designer. In 2004, she began designing websites full-time when she moved her web design firm to the Connecticut shoreline… to Guilford, CT… where she currently resides. Margaret possesses a rare set of right brain/left brain skills… she is capable of creating breathtakingly beautiful website designs and but she can also develop the back-end code that makes those beautiful websites function properly on the web. She enjoys making websites that are found easily in the top search results. Her clients find this skill particularly useful.
Margaret’s Folly is aptly named. While she is more than capable of designing websites in any genre, if allowed, Ms. Tehan’s logos, graphics and web sites are imbued with her warm sense of humor and that “certain something” that gives her designs a creative edge. Take a look at her website design portfolio and at the services she can provide to assist you in your online marketing endeavors.