Andy Hoppe is originally from Berlin, Germany. His background includes telecommunications engineering, some TV production, computer animation & game graphics. Tired of the German weather, he joined a bunch of creative folks on the island of Mallorca to create web sites for major brands (mostly food & beverages sector). Eventually established a corporate communications consultancy back in Berlin. Initial success, including major projects for Schindler AG and a number of other known names, came to an end as the Web 1.0 bubble did the same. Upon another detour involving an equally bankrupt IT firm near Stuttgart, Andy ended up working for regional government agencies in Surrey (UK), where usability and accessibility became a major focus. Since 2003, he's a web producer at the World Health Organization (Geneva, Switzerland). He lives in France with his wife and their daughter. In his current job, Andy is part of a team managing a few hundred thousand pages, partly in all 6 UN languages. On the side, he has nearly finished writing a multilingual CMS and maintains a number of niche sites, mostly in German, attracting 550000 unique visitors per day (well, according to his hosting company 1&1 - he somewhat doubts their claim not to count repeat visitors within the same day ;o)