Los Gatos Weekly-Times
Around Town
Photograph by George Sakkestad
Michael Diamond, a 17-year-old senior at Los Gatos High School, has taken his love of learning programming languages and designing websites and turned it into a profitable home-based business. Digital Gemstones, his self-run web design company, already has a handful of paying clients.
Diamond shines bright with website business
By Jennifer M. van der Kleut
Unless Mom and Dad are willing to dish out a generous allowance, most high school students find themselves pulling minimum wage in food service or retail in order to generate some spending cash.
Not Michael Diamond. This Los Gatos High School student pulls in roughly $20 an hour, without even leaving his room.
Not bad for a 17-year-old.
How does he do it? Digital Gemstones, his web design and programming company. What's even crazier is that he's almost entirely self-taught.
Michael, a senior, inherited a love of photography from his father; little did he know it would blossom into his very own profit-making venture.
"[My dad] got me a camera for my 15th birthday, and then I took a photo class at [Los Gatos High]. I wanted a place to put my photos, and I knew some basic HTML and web management skillsjust some basic stuff I learned in an online newspaper class in the seventh grade," Michael says.
Michael started out by putting together a free site through Geocities.com, but discovered you get what you pay for.
"I knew it wasn't very good, so I bought a book on HTML and taught myself a little more," he says.
Last October, he decided to try again and took advantage of a deal for a free website from Offlife Hosting. It offered him real server space, a file manager and the chance to build his site the way he wanted it.
"I started playing with it a bit more and made a basic template," he says.
Next, he decided to upgrade his skills and began teaching himself PHP Hypertext Preprocessor, a newer language he says allows programmers to create a dynamic web page without knowing ahead of time what the content will be, and CSS, a formatting language that works in tandem with HTML.
In February he bought the domain name DigitalGemstones.com, and his site was up and running. Michael says the name came from his last name, Diamond, and his preferred online screen name, "gemstone."
At this point, Michael says he was mainly focusing on his hobby of photography and having a better site to display his photos--but apparently, the universe had more in mind for him.
"Browsing online forums, I realized there are still a lot of people out there who want and need websites but don't know to create them," he says. "It gave me the idea that I know enough, I think, to be able to offer my services for building and managing websites."
Soon, Michael had his first paying customer.
Mark Howland, a trainer at the Los Gatos Courtside Club, had created a basic website for his cyclocross team, Black Market Racing, in the program DreamWeaver. However, it needed a little help.
"His website was not very uniform and efficient, so I offered to optimize it for him, which is something I've become very good at," Michael says.
Michael helped improve Howland's website and add a photo gallery, which proved to be a great starting point for Digital Gemstones.
Soon, he was helping to manage the website of Ola's Coffee.
"Whenever [the owner] need updates or changes to the site, he gives me a call or sends me an email," Michael says.
He started looking for more clients and found some work browsing online forums--an artist out of Arizona paid him to build her a website. All the while, Michael has continued to improve his skills, and estimates he has probably read more than a dozen programming books by now. Recently, Michael was contacted by a web company to build an online forum entirely from scratch, his first big-ticket client. These days, he is hard at work on the project.
"It's really interesting to be working on this project, because I learn so much about the language, security and so forth," he says. "It's really cool to get paid to learn all that as I work." Michael has also recently begun running the site for a trainer out of Campbell, Sirius Baseball, and still manages the site for both Ola's Coffee and the Los Gatos High School Politics and Current Events Club.
What is he doing with all his money? He hopes to pay his own way when he and his schoolmates take a trip to Europe.
"I really want to go there," he says. "My parents could probably pay for it, but I really want to pay for it myself, to have the experience of working toward something like that and accomplishing it."
Michael says he works with his clients to determine a reasonable rate they can afford, and, on average, brings in about $20 an hour. To put that into perspective, he says it typically takes five to 10 hours to optimize a site, and 10 to 15 hours to build one from scratch. Other times, his clients choose to pay a flat fee up front.
Looking toward graduation in June, Michael says he is applying to nine private schools across the country. He plans to major in political science as well as pursue studies in computer science, either as a double major or a minor. In pursuit of his passion, Michael recently joined U.S. Rep. Mike Honda's Student Advisory Committee. He has attended two meetings with the group so far, and says it is concentrating on issues in education and the local homeless.
Visit www.digitalgemstones.com.
