The story
Three years of borrowed wifi.
Robert spent the years before Paper Crane working from wherever he happened to be. Beitostølen in Norway, then Australia, then Thailand.
The web work went out under the name Digidome: freelance builds for clients who mostly never met him, from 2017 to 2019. Alongside it he worked as an SEO specialist, which in practice meant learning how search engines actually decide things rather than how the blog posts say they do.
In 2018 and 2019 he shot commercial photography in Australia as Robert Simmons Photography. It is the most useful design education he has had, and the reason he is difficult about image compression.
He also ran a brand called Where the Wifi’s Weak, a blog about how to keep working while living on the road. Writing it meant publishing on connections that barely held, which is a strong incentive to care about page weight. That instinct is still most of what he does for clients.
In late 2019 he co-founded Paper Crane with Tara McLaughlin and stopped moving. He runs the online development side: websites, platforms, software, and increasingly the AI systems that sit behind them.
Every site I built for two years was tested on a connection that could not load it.
Career
The jobs, in order
- 2017–2019
Founder and web developer
Digidome · Beitostølen, Australia, Thailand
Freelance web development under his own shingle, run from Norway, Australia and Thailand. Clients in one timezone, Robert in another, and an SEO practice built in parallel because the sites had to be found as well as finished.
- 2017–2019
Founder
Where the Wifi’s Weak · A blog about working from the road
A blog for people trying to work while living out of a bag. Part guide, part audience-building exercise, and a live test of how a site behaves on a bad connection.
- 2018–2019
Photographer
Robert Simmons Photography · Australia
Commercial photography in Australia. Light, framing and the discipline of getting it right before anyone sees it.
- 2019
Co-founder and head of online developmentnow
Paper Crane · Calgary
Co-founded with Tara McLaughlin in late 2019. Robert heads online development: websites, platforms, custom software, business automation, and the AI work that has grown out of all three.
I have never once been asked to make a website slower.
Robert Simmons
