UWSAG talks to Terry Gregory
of the Chicagology Website

1. What got you started in website design?
   
   "About a year and a half ago, I began to research my family history. In the beginning very little information was known beyond my parents and I hoped that by building an attractive website I might be able to locate other living relatives. As the results of the research grew, it became evident that my family history paralleled the history of the City of Chicago, with our roots going back five generations to the mid-1850’s. I became very interested in Chicago history and so decided to spin-off the Chicago portion of my family history site, Gregoryology.com. Thus was born Chicagology.com."
   
   
2. What do you hope to accomplish with your website?
   
   "My hope is to provide interesting and not commonly known facts about the growth of Chicago with an emphasis on pre-Fire (1871) images of Chicago."
   
   
3. What advice would you give other webmasters?
   
   "I am not a designer per se, but am exposed to graphic design in different media as a result of my line of work and so have developed a sense for what works visually for me. My preference is to keep the design simple and clean, with a structure that is easy to read, like a book. I also recommend using a good image editing program (like Photoshop) to manipulate images for color balance, contrast and visual consistency overall."
   
   
4. What was the biggest problem you faced with your website?
   
   "Finding quality content."
   
   
5. If you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently?
   
   "Nothing really. When I realize that I should have done a thing differently, I just change it. The nature of the internet allows instant and fairly painless changes, unlike producing a printed piece. It has been a learning process which is probably unavoidable."
   
   
6. What plans do you have for the future?
   
   "Constantly improving the look and content. I’d like the site to be a useful source for anyone wanting to learn more about early Chicago."
   
   
7. What else do you like to do?
   
   "Beyond the normals (playing golf, tennis, baseball, bicycling and hiking), I collect wind-up phonographs, Roman coins, and am an avid photographer."