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Web Designer. When Colombia's advertising job market hit
the skids in 1996, Fernando Camacho Lotero found the perfect new job to
match his training and talents--web designer. After discovering that the web-design software resembled
advertising software, Camacho, 40, started his own web venture. Last year,
he designed nearly 20 websites, compared with three in 1996. "The
Internet is booming more than any other sector here," says Camacho.
That's despite Colombia's deepest recession in decades.
Unlike conventional advertising, which can be expensive and short-lived an
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Internet campaign involves only periodic updates and a monthly hosting
fee, or rent charged for having a page posted on a server. Local technology is causing Camacho most of his
headaches. Colombian servers initially proved so unreliable that he
registered space for his customers, or hosted their websites with a
Toronto-based company. Even now, inadequate bandwidth on the nation's
telephone lines can cause delays of several minutes just to click onto the
next page during peak hours. Camacho says when he first formed the
start-up, he started uploading files at 6 a.m. to avoid cyberspace
bottlenecking.
Now, the former ad man's sold on the web's future. |
