Racine Web developer Mark Czerniec

I pronounce my last name “SER-nick.” I’m a Web developer living with my wonderful wife Amy in Racine, Wisconsin — about 25 miles south of Milwaukee and 60 miles north of Chicago, where I was born. Most of my life was spent just south of here in Kenosha. My mom still lives there, and three of my sisters also reside in the area with a fourth now living in Ohio. My dad, who spent his working life managing Ace Hardware stores, died in 1980.

Racine Web developer

I am a Racine Web developer. I design websites for myself and for other small businesses here and in Kenosha, plus the greater Chicago-Milwaukee corridor and beyond.

Media — writing, photos, illustrations, audio, video, and computers — have engrossed me all my life, so I was very excited when the World Wide Web combined all this into one brilliant system allowing me to edit and publish anything I could dream up, at very little cost.

My first website, a guide to Kenosha, went online in March of 1996, just as the general public was beginning to use the Web. Before long, I was communicating with people all over the world — former Kenoshans living in Tokyo and Addis Ababa, and former Italian soldiers looking for old comrades back here. My site served as Kenosha’s unofficial online Chamber of Commerce long before the real Chamber ever went online.

Soon, companies began hiring me to do Web design for them, and I have continued to develop and maintain a variety of Web projects for the past 16 years.

Chicago radio

Before the Web, the medium I loved best was radio, and one personality who really sparked my imagination as a young adult was Chicago radio legend Steve Dahl. I started haunting the WLS-FM show he did with Garry Meier in 1981 as a mysterious caller who phoned in wacky tape creations I had edited together. This turned into a daily job as the Steve and Garry Show’s “All My Children Update” guy, “Mark from Kenosha,” from 1982 to 1986.

A number of other commercial and public radio jobs followed. I created radio for WLS, WGTD, WGN, and WLIP, and then eventually returned to work for Steve Dahl at WCKG on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. Steve needed someone to monitor news, surf the Internet, and do research for him behind the scenes while he was on the air. So, employed by CBS Radio while telecommuting from my home in Wisconsin, I became his information director for the next seven years, until the show was canceled at WJMK in December of 2008.

Since then, I have immersed myself exclusively in new media, and have been helping small businesses use it to reach wider audiences. MarkCz.com itself tallies roughly 15,000 visitors per month and keeps growing.

Food, literature, music

In general, I love culture. I enjoy music and food and movies and literature from all over the world, and I want to be Anthony Bourdain or Samantha Brown or Michael Palin or Burt Wolf when I grow up.

I am intrigued by the rustic and the traditional, and by folktales, customs, religion and mythology. I spent years reading and re-reading the work of Joseph Campbell, the single greatest teacher I have had in life.

Amy and I bought our home in Racine in 2005, and have since been soaking in the bliss of quiet domesticity. We both enjoy food and cooking, and have taken up gardening and landscaping.

I try to play acoustic guitar for about 45 minutes to an hour each day, hoping to maintain the callouses on my fingertips, and perhaps impress the neighbors.