The minute our Compassionate Eye Foundation media committee interviewed Francisco we knew we had a match! Francisco is keen, clear, smart and an excellent listener. I will always highly recommend him. His attention to detail is outstanding. We love him and we love our website too! He simply goes the extra mile. 
what is in our name
PICSSEL is pronounced "pixel".
- CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is the most common application to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML.
- Pixel is the smallest item of information in an image.
- Our mission is to craft and deliver web interfaces that are elegant, usable and accessible "pixel by pixel".
who we are
PICSSEL is the web design studio of Francisco Diaz, an enthusiastic and talented web designer living in Vancouver, Canada.
- Crafting websites is our passion, and our strong background in the field and grasp of web technologies paved the way.
- We are "hard coders" but with natural artistic and soft skills.
- We may be a small company, but our attention to detail is big.
- Although we are geeks and technology "savvy", we have a keen understanding of user needs and language.
- We have long experience in the field (Francisco's resumé) but we listen to what you say and what you need.
- We speak human. Please visit our services section.
- Above all, we are professionals: we strongly promote web standards and best practices.
resumé
Francisco has working with computers, software and technology for so long that he doesn't even remember since when and he has seen and worked with things that many geek-kids today never imagined existed.
He started working with computers bigger than the apartment he lives today. He wrote his first ever BASIC program in a DEC VAX-11/700 series and he even learned to write programs with the use of punched cards. He also wrote administrative programs in a HP 3000 using COBOL.
He has witnessed the birth and evolution of the PC and bought his first personal computer, which had 256KB of RAM, two floppy disks of 5.25" / 360KB each, MS-DOS 2.0 and an amber monochrome display . . . and no hard disk (an external 10MB "brick-look" style was later acquired.)
He used the first spreadsheet Visicalc in an Apple IIe to generate financial reports while working as an accountant assistant during the day and taking programming courses during the night. He taught himself and taught many others to use WordStar, Lotus 1-2-3, Quattro Pro, and WordPerfect when they were popular office applications. He helped a publisher friend of him to produce a book content using Aldus PageMaker. They acquired a set of 45 floppy disks with different fonts and typefaces for this program.
He first started working with peer-to-peer computer networks using MS Windows for Workgroups and learned the hard way to install Ethernet 10Base2 and 10Base-T wired networks.
He learned, used, installed, configured, troubleshot, trained and mastered all Novell Netware versions from the 2.15 to 6.5. In his free time he earned the Master CNE certification. He also ended up learning, teaching and supporting MS Windows NT/2000/2003 Server and became MCP for those products. The use, installation, configuration and support of networking hardware (modems, hubs, switches and routers), was also part of the soup. He got some extra free time and he earned Cisco's CCNA and CCDA certifications.
He also remembers that he got a Diploma in Fiber Optics Technologies and Splicing from The Texas A&M University.
He has worked for top IBM, Microsoft and Novell Business Partners evaluating, installing, configuring, supporting, administering, training and marketing computers, servers, networks, operating systems and professional services. He worked for NEC as Server's Senior Support Engineer (T3) and Server's Training Manager within the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. He has delivered training and lectures in English, French and Spanish. Lately he has been administering web and mail servers, domains and web hosting services and he is a web design entrepreneur.
Regardless his long path along the information technology history, Francisco has not yet lots of webs on his head but a few web-sites. He firmly believes that he has what it takes to help you leverage your business with a nicely-done website; he also can take your existing design for a re-design and optimization within the standards using valid and semantic code and user-friendly interfaces. Find out more about how he can help you in our services section.
And finally, he thinks Mexicans make the best food, Italians make the best coffee, Belgians make the best chocolate and French Girls are the best (he actually lives with three.)
