The "Back Story"

John M Robertson grew up in Los Angeles, the son of a Hollywood (OK...actually Burbank) stage manager. He was building backdrops, running sound, painting sets and rigging studio lighting by middle school and shot his first commercial at age 16. His parents sent him to the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago where he did his best not to attend college: from hitchhiking across the country with nothing but his girlfriend and a camera to sailing Puget Sound and the Alaska Waterway and working film crews in Mexico and the Caribbean, John also got married and had four children to support before age 25. Far too busy living life to attend classes, he had another close brush with education at Cal State Fullerton after his first divorce. He has worked on film and video shoots in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, worked with every kind of actor (from a newborn baby to a live alligator), taken a film crew into Arizona's Superstition Mountains on horseback and gone down Ohio's Mohican River with a film crew in canoes. He taught himself HTML in 1994 because there was no other way to learn it at that time (many late nights with coffee, dialup online tutorials, Netscape Navigator and Notepad...). These were the days of the Wild, Wild Web - there was no college, vocational school or design institute that offered a web design course - it was all too new, evolving and reinventing itself daily. John built his first website in October of 1994 and has kept with it, learning new web technologies as they have evolved: PHP, MySQL, CSS, Flash, Wordpress and more. He has also kept his hand in the film and video production scene as it has graduated from 35mm to HD and from celluloid based A-B Moviola editing to fully computer-based FinalCut and Adobe Premiere Pro. Today these two worlds of video and the internet are converging, placing John and Topside Marketing at the forefront of the Video-for-the-Web wave, the newest technological leap to revolutionize the Internet.

Why it works to be a "Jack of all Trades":
By 1996 John Robertson was a Marketing Manager at a technology firm in Downtown Seattle. Because he could build websites, write effective advertising copy and create compelling marketing materials, John found that people he met often came to him with their personal, outside projects. Soon he was doing projects for many of his friends, co-workers and their family members. A part-time business at first, Topside Marketing was formed as a vehicle for these outside projects. As word of mouth spread and more and more clients came to Topside Marketing, John eventually quit his "day job" in 1999 and went with Topside Marketing full time. The company was re-organized as a Washington State Limited Liability Corporation in 2003. Topsidat