About
Prepressure.com is a web enabled notebook on all things graphic that is created and maintained by your truly, Laurens Leurs. Long ago I studied Industrial Design but somehow ended up working in the graphic arts industry. I started out as a customer support engineer and gradually moved to a pre-sales job – focusing mainly on workflow and output systems. For a few years I worked on a publishing solution, which was great fun. Nowadays I am the product manager of Apogee StoreFront, the web-to-print solution of Agfa Graphics.
If I ever get the opportunity to play the prepress geek
in The Simpsons, I’ll probably look like this.
Prepressure
This site was started around 1997 as a kind of HTML exercise. It originally ran on a web server of the city of Antwerp. The very first pages were created using Claris Homepage, a very basic HTML editor. As a support engineer I got daily calls about PostScript errors. The site became my database of everything I knew about this topic so it was aptly called the PostScript Panic Page. Around 3000 people visited it in 1998.
After a few years I switched to DreamWeaver and a spot on the servers of Belgacom, my internet provider. Being an early PDF fan, I added a big section about PDF to the site. To reflect the change, the PostScript Panic Page became the Prepress Panic Page. In 2001 the number of yearly visitors had already increased to 40000.
In 2002 I registered the Prepressure domain name and moved to shared hosting. I’ve been happy with the service of ICDsoft ever since. In case you are curious: this site runs on an HP DL380 server somewhere near Los Angeles.
I did lose interest in the maintenance of Prepressure.com for a few years. As the editor of a support newsletter doing two similar jobs simply became too boring. My job description changed in 2007 so I decided to clean up the site while migrating the design to a database driven system, powered by WordPress.
This move finally enabled me to have a site design in which visitors themselves can share their knowledge using the Comments function. The redesign initially drew less visitors but eventually Google learned to like the site again and started sending visitors to it. In 2007 the site generated around 1.6 million page views. Lately that number has started declining because of the increased competition from all kinds of professionally run sites.
Thanks for visiting & have fun!
Legal disclaimer: The author of this web site cannot be held responsible for any damage inflicted by the use of the information provided on this web site. This site is beerware: if the information provided is of some use to you, you are obliged to offer the author a Duvel or other Belgian style beer whenever you encounter him and he is in the mood for a drink. The author freely admits that he is often in the mood for a good beer. No animals were hurt during the creation of this site (yet). The ads on this site are not used to adapt your interest profile – your privacy is as important as mine.