Twenty years in, still opening the inspector.

I started as Grand Valley State University’s first full-time web developer in 2002, which mostly meant converting paper forms into web forms and then explaining to a dean why that was worth doing. Nineteen years later I was directing a $4M marketing budget and an Associate Vice President title, and I took a job with a smaller scope on purpose.

That is the part of my history I get asked about most, so here it is up front: the AVP role was further from the work than I wanted to be. Strategy that never touches the implementation drifts. I would rather set the roadmap and then be in the repo when it ships. At Global Fishing Watch I get both, on a site that exists to show the world where commercial fishing actually happens.

What I actually do

The job title changes but the work has been consistent: figure out what a website is for, build the measurement that proves whether it is working, and then prioritize honestly against that instead of against whoever emailed most recently. SEO and conversion optimization are how the numbers move. Analytics is how you know they moved. Accessibility is not a phase at the end.

I have spent more than a decade on accessibility specifically, including leading WCAG compliance work at a public university and serving as an Inclusion Advocate throughout. That work is unglamorous and it is the part of my career I am most confident was worth doing.

On the AI part

A meaningful share of the questions my sites used to answer are now answered by a model instead, and the reader never arrives. So I treat AI answer engines as a channel with its own requirements rather than a threat to complain about: what makes a page citable, which entities a model needs defined, where structured data actually changes the answer. I audit for it the same way I audit for search, by testing real prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity and scoring what comes back.

I also build with these tools daily, which is the only reason a one-person roadmap covers web, iOS, content, and analytics at once. The useful skill is not prompting. It is knowing which parts of the work you are still on the hook for, and reviewing the output like you would a contractor’s.

What I build when nobody asked

Trailside Birding is a static site pairing trail data with eBird hotspots, built partly because I wanted the guide to exist and partly to keep my hands on a modern stack. Drive AQI Monitor puts air quality on the CarPlay Dashboard, which required learning ActivityKit and accepting that CarPlay simulators are their own kind of hobby. Just Frame turns an idle iPad into a photo frame that tells you where each picture was taken, by reading the GPS data your photos have been carrying all along. Luck Dragon Games is a two-person studio that has shipped exactly one title, which is one more than most two-person studios.

These are not resume padding. They are how I stay fluent enough to have real opinions in a roadmap conversation.

Elsewhere

I live in Grand Rapids, Michigan with a Master’s in Computer and Information Systems Security, which is a long way of saying I read the security review. I have spoken at EduWeb, HighEdWeb, and the Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference, and I once ran an e-commerce company whose product ended up on Extreme Home Makeover and in Martha Stewart’s Holiday Gift Guide. Ask me about that one.

If you are hiring for web strategy and the mission is real, I would like to hear about it: dave.poortvliet@gmail.com or LinkedIn.