About Stop14
about the company | about content management | about the name
About the Company
I began Stop14 Media as a sole proprietorship in the spring of 2003. My professional background is equal parts design and tech, having worked in the last ten years for a number of major design houses in Toronto and as the founding partner of the New Media firm Rhizomedia. My academic background is in neither design nor coding, but in the lucrative world of english literature and philosophy. My personal background is in the vast wastes of the suburbs (see Why Stop14?), from which i inherited a lifelong appreciation for hockey and all things heavy metal.
Stop14 brings together of all of these aspects, save for perhaps the heavy metal part (and I mean perhaps): Stop14 is a design-savvy company that brings years of technical experience together with both analytical ability and the philosophical foresight to not only understand the contemporary new media landscape, but to anticipate its future. I've gathered around me a team of experienced freelance coders, designers, managers and copywriters who share my vision of the possibilities of the internet.
Stop14's focus is not simply to develop websites, but to help clients understand how their websites can be more closely integrated into their everyday business. Stop14 concentrates on sound information design and content management without sacrificing design sense - there's no reason why a site can't be highly functional and aesthetically pleasing at the same time. Nevertheless, the real value of Stop14 is its ability to assess a client's unique situation, navigate the options available to them, help them to develop long range goals, and provide the technical expertise to get the job done.
What are Content Managment Systems?
The world wide web was originally created as a way to share documents on the internet. Tim Berners-Lee developed a language, HTML, that allowed document writers to mark up their writing in a logical fashion, relying on browser software (notice the book-ish term "browser") to interpret HTML's largely structural tags such as <emphasis>, <blockquote> and <citation>.
When the image (<img>) tag was introduced by the NCSA for their Mosaic browser, purists heralded it as the death-knell of the document-centred web. The very thing that popularized the web to unfathomable proportions was ironically cited as the thing that most violated the web's initial populist principles; HTML was designed to be simple enough that novice users could make and share documents, but the <img> tag added such complexity that it put websites squarely into the hands of IT professionals. People began thinking about the web as a kind of television, and during the dot-com boom of the late nineties everyone was spouting off about "convergence" (of the web and video) and "rich media" as the future of the internet.
The web has matured out of this phase, and most of the dreams of video-on-demand died because the idea of convergence itself moved too far away from what the web was designed to do in the first place: push words around. At the same time as money was being blown on nonsensical startups, some good work was being done to reinvest in the original ideals of the internet: allowing content creators control over web publishing under the assumption that the real technological thinking should go into making it easier to get information online.
Enter Content Management Systems (CMS), complex pieces of software that handle the technical aspects of making web pages automatically so that the people managing the content don't have to worry about it. The CMS phenomenon is as potentially big as the <img> tag itself was, if only because it acknowledges that the web is still a publishing venue, a place to get information to the people who may be interested in it. A basic example of a CMS is blog software, the online journal systems that let people post their thoughts and comments to websites through a simple interface. Other examples include bulletin boards, which are designed to accomodate group discussion, and most e-commerce software which allows the people responsible for sales to manage their online store.
Content Management Systems now provide the backbone of most major websites, and are robust affairs that handle the very demanding publishing environments. Advancements in database technology, the push towards consistent web standards for browsers (e.g. CSS) and the swift uptake of XML (a document-centred markup language) have also contributed to the overall maturity of CMS-driven websites. In this new era of the internet the real value is placed on information management, the ability to design intelligent architectures for online content that empower both those developing it and those looking to find it. Finally, the web is beginning to fulfill its original promise.
So why Stop14?
This company is called Stop14 because I one day hope to turn it into a four-piece power-punk outfit much like Blink-182 and Sum41. Alright, not really. Stop14 is a phrase that reminds me of the old saw that you need to understand where you've been to better know where you're going. Let me explain.
When I was growing up in my patch of suburbia there was a strip-mall near my home that the locals, including us kids, used to call "Stop14". It was your typical strip-mall that supported the culinary needs of a teenager with aplomb, sporting a McDonald's, John Anderson's (a hockey-themed greasy-spoon started and soon abandoned by the eponymous Toronto Maple Leaf), Duckworth's (a fish-and-chip store that we insisted was the best in Toronto despite never eating at any others) and at least five (yes, five) donut shops. My mother, a longtime resident of the area, would often announce that she was heading to "Stop14", which was code for her weekly trip to the local convenience store. I, like most of the current residents of the area, never thought twice about the name, even though there was no sign anywhere in the city block with "Stop14" on it. Not one.
I finally prompted my mother to let me in on it... why the hell has everyone been calling the strip mall Stop14? Turns out the answer this mystery we’re going to have to way back to a previous era of public transportation in Toronto. In the early part of the 20th century the outlying areas of Toronto were serviced by independent transit operators. The amalgamated Toronto Transit Commission began buying up these independent railcar services, referring to them as "The Radial Lines”. Travelling to Scarborough meant that riders had to get off of their original car at Woodbine and Kingston Road and pay a separate fare to ride on one of these Radial trains. Once inside there was a pegboard with a Stop List that enumerated the entire route, and riders would have to place a peg at the stop they wished to get off at. Sure enough, the stop where the present-day strip malls begin was number thirteen and the one where they end was fourteen.
I was amazed that there was so thorough an answer. I was even more amazed at how a term could survive that long completely unattached from its history. I began to see evidence of the old radial lines everywhere in the neighbourhood: a convenience store further up the road called “Stop16”, and a auto repair shop named “Stop12 Automotive”. Someone even briefly opened “The Stop14 Cafe” which, not being a donut shop, had no hope to survive.
When starting Stop14, the company, I was reminded of the lesson that there is much to be learned if you stop taking things at face value and dig a little deeper. The new media world has sold face-value for years, and many in the industry still will if you let them. As I mentioned earlier, the real future of the internet is in its past, where technology exists to serve its users, not to thwart or distract them.
For many clients the internet is daunting, for though you rely on the internet as part of your core business, it can nevertheless seem like a world of buzzwords and trends. Stop14 brings the knowledge, context and critical acumen your business needs to use the internet effectively. Stop14 is not interested in selling fads. It’s interested in selling critical thinking that can help solve your core problems. It’s interested in selling the knowledge to help decide the right technologies for your enterprise. It’s interested in selling the expertise to make those technologies work not just for now, but over the long term as well.
Note
All of the images throughout the site were culled from photographs and other emphemera from the Scarborough Radial Lines. The image on the right side of this page is the original radial line stop list, with Stop14 marked as the “Halfway House”, a 19th cenutry in that has long since moved to Black Creek Pioneer Village.