Steve is an ageing inhabitant of the online frontier towns of 'Why Do I Need a Website', 'E-commerce Is Small Now, But Just YouWait' and 'Dot-com Boom Time'. Presently he is living in 'Making Google Love Your Website', running a small consulting practice - Search Johnston - as a Google consultant (you can follow him on Twitter @stevejohnston).
He likes to think that he's acquired a bit of wisdom in the course of the career he embarked on in 1994, which was very much a leap of faith in what the newly-invented World Wide Web was going to do for business. Most of his contribution to websites during these years has been as an independent voice encouraging common sense, vision and strategy to organisations struggling with their adoption of the web. It wasn't that he thought he was necessarily qualified to make such a contribution - he simply couldn't help himself.
He had a hands-on interest in computer technology that had begun in high school at the end of the 1970s, and he found a use for it in everything he subsequently did in business during the late 1980s and early 1990s. When the web arrived, it seemed an obvious extension of computing's contribution to business: already managing data and transaction processing in the background, it could now process the communication channel between consumers and business. The day he first wrestled an internet connection into life in the summer of 1994 - and it really needed wrestling in those days - and browsed the web page of a university lecturer in California (complete with a lovely photographic portrait of his young son) from his London suburb, is etched in his memory as a moment of real wonder. He has remained passionate about the web ever since.
Steve is also old enough to have had a pre-web career, and the call of a frontier town was irresistible then too. Having spent a couple of years as a bookselling apprentice after his time at university (studying psychology), in the following seven years he attempted to create a high street bookselling group from scratch in South London. Ultimately he wasn't successful, making a number of first-business mistakes that were largely obscured by the excesses of the boom of the late 1980s, but which were cruelly exposed by the subsequent recession. Where Steve lacks conspicuous business success, he takes comfort in the value of experience. And yes, that was him on Dragons' Den in 2006, but that is a story for another time.
Steve is married with three teenage children and lives near the Roman city of Bath, in the south-west of the UK.
