About Frank.

A former fed who got out, learned the web in 1997, and has spent the years since making other people’s sites work. Clerqs is what happens when you write down every tedious job you’ve done for clients by hand and decide to automate the lot.

Who am I?

I worked at the IRS. I taught in Philadelphia. Then I went and became a webmaster, which I’ve been doing since around 1997 — long enough to remember when getting a site ranked meant something different every eighteen months, and long enough to have kept up each time.

What I actually do is SEO, WordPress, traffic networking, revenue optimising and the statistical analysis that tells you which of the first three is working. I have a BA in professional writing, which turns out to matter more in this line of work than anyone expects. Projects I’ve run have pulled 350,000–400,000 daily visitors from search engines at their peak. That number is why I take the whole “traffic is dying” conversation seriously rather than personally.

These days most of my time goes to client sites and to projects of my own. Clerqs is one of them — mine, start to finish.

Who have I worked with?

It took me a while to realise I’ve been working for quite a few well-known people. It sneaks up on you when you’re busy.

Why Clerqs exists

Every one of the tools on this site started as a job I did for a client by hand. Checking whether a sponsorship email was real. Reading a brand contract for the clause that would cost them money. Working out whether an RPM was any good. Pulling the AI crawlers out of a server log. Fixing four hundred filenames before an upload.

None of those jobs is hard. All of them are tedious, all of them are easy to get slightly wrong, and every one of them was being done at eleven at night by somebody who’d rather be making things. So: clerks. You hand the job over, it comes back done.

Two rules I hold the site to. Every tool has to do real work — no thin pages built to catch a search query. And nothing you paste leaves your browser unless you choose to submit it to one of the shared benchmarks, in which case it goes in anonymised and you get to see everyone else’s in return.

Need a site, not just a tool?

I still build them. WordPress and KVS video platforms, hosting, ads, SEO, the lot. Here’s how that works, and what I have room for.