I've been lucky to work with so many incredible mentors, co-workers, supervisors, direct reports, customers and partners in my career thus far. Many of them have been generous enough to leave me a kind review.
"Monica was a great manager - she gave me the freedom to work on projects that impacted the business and were meaningful to me as a professional.
She focused on progress and used her creative mind to innovate where possible. She was a great teacher and I'll continue to learn from her as I imagine we will collaborate in the future."
This site was laid down over the course of about 3 weeks, starting off as a relatively simple couple of pages of samples to mirror what you'd need an account to see on UpWork, but evolving into an opportunity to play around with the w3.css framework, a little javascript here and there, and PHP underneath it all. I also focused on using .webp graphics as much as possible. They get a bad rap but honestly they're so much smaller than JPGs and PNGs - sometimes 90% smaller for the same image - and while no browser is going to struggle to load a 10k image, it will load a 1k image even faster. And I needed to keep things lightweight to drop that 8 meg resource-hogging Lumen5 video behind the landing page content.
I decided not to use a Content Management System (CMS) mostly because - well, I don't need one, and this is faster and infinitely tweakable. If you know the underlying languages, you don't want to be restricted by hard-coded 'templates' and the last thing I want is to maintain a bunch of decaying plugins to keep the site functional - a curse specific to Wordpress sites. But even in Hubspot, it can be a pain to change your mind and decide that what you thought was going to be a grid will instead work better as a dropdown or an accordion. And the expanding GTM page panels aren't anything I've really seen before, certainly nothing you can just dial up in Wix.
Where a CMS is definitely a better choice then just creating the whole thing ex nihilo is when you want to transact purchases directly on your site, or there's a benefit to managing leads and contacts connected to your site (almost always the case, in other words, for a real business site). Sure, I could build out a mySQL database and some kind of forms and frontend for all that, if I had a month to do it, but that would be a gigantic waste of time when you can get it out of the box for next to nothing from Wix or Hubspot, plus built-in reporting and all the other goodies. I can't recreate those products or their functionality in a month or a year or ever. You trade away some freedom but you also avoid massive headaches, security concerns, and more when you opt to use a CMS.
Oh, that's me too. I bought the domain more than a decade ago on the off chance that at some point in the future I'd open a candy store. I still might; the longer you hold on to a domain name, the more Google likes it, so it's all good (Though Google is now more of a hostage situation for its users than a way to find other sites; it never wants you to leave, and SEO is a wandering orphan right now because of it).
The Galaxy Sweet playlist, incidentally, is atomic-age-candy-store PA music hand-picked for a candy shop that doesn't quite exist. Feel free to grab it for yourself on Spotify.
Site built by Monica Bower.
Contents, samples and collateral © 2012-2025 Monica Bower and/or their respective owners and used with permission. Images created by Monica Bower. Images are free to use under CC-SA-BY. Find out more about the site on About Me.
Candy, Popcorn and Space Adventures - meet my toplevel domain on Galaxy Sweet
"Monica is a great listener and able to convert strategy into a marketing plan and execute within a set budget.
"It has always been a pleasure working with Monica. Her professionalism and responsiveness makes it easy to know that, as a client, I am valued and my time is as valuable as the business I bring. As in any business relationship, there have been times when I really needed assistance and without exception, Monica has always delivered honest, forthcoming information. She always ensures that I have the information necessary to understand the options and risk mitigation needed for strong decision making. Monica has consistently made it easy to work with her and the company she represents. I appreciate all of the time and energy and look forward to more years working together."
"Monica 's love of the bottom line makes her a friend to C-level executives, but her fearless creativity and knack for coming up with counter-intutitive but compelling ideas and solutions – as if she has an endless supply of them – earn her the respect of management and employees alike. She constantly seeks ways to pull more revenue out of existing models and to create new ways to boost profits, and her management expertise and past experience in so many disciplines - graphic design, copywriting, websites, deal negotiation, customer experience, brand management, direct mail, trade show events and accounting spreadsheets, to scratch the surface – make her a confident innovator with good instincts and tons of initiative to get things done."
"Monica 's love of the bottom line makes her a friend to C-level executives, but her fearless creativity and knack for coming up with counter-intutitive but compelling ideas and solutions – as if she has an endless supply of them – earn her the respect of management and employees alike. She constantly seeks ways to pull more revenue out of existing models and to create new ways to boost profits, and her management expertise and past experience in so many disciplines - graphic design, copywriting, websites, deal negotiation, customer experience, brand management, direct mail, trade show events and accounting spreadsheets, to scratch the surface – make her a confident innovator with good instincts and tons of initiative to get things done."
"Monica is a valuable member of the PaydayPERX team. Her dedication to seeing the company succeed is what has helped drive PaydayPERX from a small, local business to a nationally recognized company almost overnight. Monica is the type of person that you can ask a question to and she will 9 times out of 10 have the answer. She is able to lead without being domineering, making everyone feel as though they are her equal. I trust her opinion, and she makes it known that she values mine. Monica's intellect and wit keeps our office moving forward and upward, and I appreciate what she has done to help myself and our company continue to grow."
"I worked with Monica at Macola Software and it was obvious she was a talented, smart, savvy marketing pro with huge potential to do really, really great work. She's easy to work alongside and has the rarest combination among marketing people: book smarts combined with street smarts. Trained as a designer, she brings focus and attention to detail to combine the art and science of marketing."
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