The Man Behind DMXzone

February 4, 2016

The story behind DMXzone and more

In our post on Wednesday The Story Behind DMXzone, we took you all the way back to the start of DMXzone. You could see all of the highlights from 15 years back until now. It's interesting to see the timeline and to hear the story behind it, but we would also like to show you the story as told by the man behind DMXzone: George Petrov, CEO and founder of the company. Check out the exclusive, in-depth interview we conducted with him.  

The Story

DMXzone exists for 15 years already, but how did you get into the programming/developing business before that? 

I always had a passion for automating things, making everything easy to use. It started in the 80’s when I was studying Architecture in Bulgaria, where I was born and raised. During my study I had to draw a lot of technical schemes and make a lot of calculations. I hated to do the same thing over and over again, so I was always looking for a way to improve the methods. 

Back then we just got our first computers at school, called Pravetz. They were actually a great copy of the Apple II,so we were pretty much up-to-date. On these computers I discovered BASIC and started programming.

Later on I did a lot of programming in QuickBasic and started building my own text version of Windows before the real Windows came out. I actually sold that as my first real big software package to a big software company and earned my first money. I was about 17 back then.

"I always had a passion for automating things, making everything easy to use." 

As soon as I finished my degree in Architecture in the 90’s, I had the ambition to explore a different country and try to succeed there. This is how I ended up in Holland in 1991. Visiting some relatives I discovered this magnificent country, full of opportunities. With great luck I got a job at Philips, where next to working with great technical people, I also got the opportunity to get my computer science degree at the University of Computer Science in Eindhoven.

During my work at Philips, I was always automating things such as company processes, factories monitoring software and much more. There I also discovered the first Internet, back then it was just Unix networks between major universities and large corporations. Still I saw the potential and value of connecting and exchanging information as suddenly I could talk to people on the other side of the world and exchange ideas and knowledge! This was amazing to me!

What ignited the spark in you to start creating extensions? 

After Philips, around the year 2000 I got to work for Siennax, which was a very innovative internet company (ASP/Application Software Provider) making all kind of software available online on demand. During that time I discovered Macromedia Dreamweaver and UltraDev. It allowed you to do complicated technical work without coding. It was the perfect automation tool and  it was all visual. But just like any other product I used, after a while I try to seek ways to improve the product and its workflow.

It turned out that Macromedia Dreamweaver was actually not only a groundbreaking product because of its visual design, but also because it was made to be extensible so that people can automate it by building so called Extensions. That is how I started building extensions. One after another I started automating my own Dreamweaver workflow and I loved it! It saved me so much time and it was amazingly easy to do!

How did that inspire you to start DMXzone, known as UDzone back then?

Doing Dreamweaver stuff was awesome, but back then there weren’t many ways to share your work. The most common places were a few newsgroups and mailing lists for Dreamweaver users. Soon enough, I discovered that there were many Dreamweaver users around the world and they all had the same problems and challenges, as well as the big need for automation. With the newsgroups I tried to help people a lot, but I saw that the same questions were asked over and over again. 

This gave me the inspiration to think of ways to improve these things people were asking questions about. And that’s how the first Dreamweaver community website was born. 

How were the first few months when UDzone went live? 

It was really amazing, as we saw that our site visitors were growing by the day! Many volunteers joined in and we published a lot of guides and extensions for Dreamweaver. I think people were really happy to finally have a platform where all Dreamweaver users could come together and at the same time learn and share their knowledge. What I think was especially great about this, is that it was one of the first WYSIWYG websites and online communities where people could finally share and exchange information directly without any technical hurdles. 

"People could finally exchange information directly without any technical hurdles." 

And then the big breakthrough with Macromedia, can you tell us something about that?

Well in April 2001, Macromedia saw our huge potential with the great community we built and invited us to present it at the UCON conference in New York. This was the beginning of our huge success. At UCON we showed our community to all Dreamweaver users and how we built the site completely in Dreamweaver. It was an amazing experience to present our idea and website to such a big group of skilled professionals. 

After UCON, our community exploded with new users. So, we started offering more and more high quality Dreamweaver extensions and the community got renamed to DMXzone to fit its target user base better.

How did DMXzone grew in the years after it was created?

In the next years, our success with DMXzone got even bigger and bigger. The community attracted more Dreamweaver users and we kept producing more and more extensions.

Many of the DMXzone members were writing great articles to share their knowledge and know how. This was a great community participation and in 2004 we wanted to bring this to an even higher level by hiring professional writers for our Premium Content. Those writers delivered high quality articles that people could choose from to learn more about the things they were working with. 

How would you simply say what the core of DMXzone is? 

Our core has always been writing great extensions for Dreamweaver, so our primary focus was and will always be to deliver the best possible extensions.  

What would you say the most memorable extensions were back then?

Well of course the server side extensions that we started DMXzone with; Pure ASP/PHP Upload, with its famous addons for Image Resizing and Database integrations. 

In 2004 we also opened a complete new territory of Online Content Editing by releasing the Advanced HTML Editor. Suddenly people were able to build websites with great usability and they could enable visual content editing directly onto their websites. 

The years after, we mostly focused on producing sliders and photo and video galleries. In the beginning we had most of them done in Flash, because it was the best solution at that time. So we had galleries like 3D photo Wall, Active Slideshow Pro and many more. Later on when HTML5 became the main standard and Flash was gone, we turned many of our photo galleries and sliders in HTML5 versions. 

After a while you opened an office in Sofia, what was the reason behind that?

As our community grew rapidly each year, we had to expand our business to be able to manage it all. So in 2006 we opened a new office in Bulgaria. It was a great opportunity for me to be able to do much more with the country I was born in and which I also love very much. 

So this is how I formed DMXzone’s Bulgarian team of experts. They all started with basic knowledge in the web design and development area, but thanks to the great community of DMXzone and their natural technical abilities they quickly learned all they had to know and eventually became our valuable experts that now continuously share their knowledge in the community and provide support to all members of DMXzone.

"Our core has always been writing great extensions for Dreamweaver" 

You mentioned what the most memorable extensions were a while back, what would you say the most memorable extensions are from the last few years? 

After Adobe started cleaning the legacy features of Dreamweaver around 2012/2013, the Spry library was put on the list of deprecations. So they asked us to build a new replacement for it and this is how in 2013 the HTML5 Data Bindings was born. The result was that people could connect to any public data source like for example Picasa and Facebook and connect the photos/videos published to their own website. 

As the initial HTML5 Data Bindings, data sources were only public feeds or static local files, we soon released also full blown Database connectivity. This way people could connect to their databases and fetch data from there with our DMXzone Database Connector and Updater, which allow you to make full cross platform database connectivity, without any coding.

At about the same time in 2013, Bootstrap had a new CSS design framework, which got released by Twitter and it became a standard for designing responsive websites. We quickly saw its potential and as Dreamweaver didn’t offer any integration at that time, we build a great extension for it, which eventually was a natural fit for Dreamweaver.

In 2014 as the mobile development was really hot, everybody was trying to build responsive websites that display well on mobile devices. So we saw an opportunity here and built the Visual App Designer for Framework 7. With this extension people were able to build completely native looking iOS or Material design apps completely visual in Dreamweaver. Together with the DMXzone Cordova Builder extension, all those app files could be quickly and easily packaged in a single file.

In 2015 Adobe announced the deprecation of Dreamweaver Server Behaviors, we said it's time for a more worthy replacement of all server actions. Continuing the route layout by HTML5 Data Bindings, we released DMXzone Server Connect. This extension is a fully visual workflow built for any server side actions. Now instead of writing complicated server code, you can define what action should be ran and in which order. 

"We said it's time for a more worthy replacement of all server actions." 

What is the biggest challenge in running your own business?

To me the biggest challenge is to always find a balance between family and work. I love to spend time with my children and I do always put family first, but I also see the DMXzone community as a family and love to provide them with great solutions as well. So it is a challenge to do both at the same time. Just like the community grew, so did my family – I have now four wonderful kids that I love. I also couldn’t do it without my wife Kim, who has always been my support from the very beginning.

As I can plan my own working time, during the years I found the perfect balance. I plan my time around my kids and wife so that I’m always around them in the early mornings, as well as during dinner time and after that we always have some quality time. And then throughout the day and later in the evening I can work on great new technical solutions for DMXzone. 

What’s your secret for success all these years? 

For me the secret is to always offer amazing, ahead of time solutions, which are easy to use and save people time. We take the burden off the technical difficulties in building modern websites and apps and allow people to focus on the big picture and be creative.

I love to create things that help people – this gives me the ultimate satisfaction in life. So that is why I love to do it. Making our users happy and seeing their outcomes thanks to our extensions is amazing.

Also being able to offer great technical support is very important to me. With our Live Support we try to help every user on a personal level and not only teach them how to use our extensions, but also offer them advice on how to solve more generic problems and challenges.

What do you do when you’re not at the office? Any hobbies? 

Well as I’m very often behind a screen, I don’t like to just sit around in my free time.  I find it very important to stay in shape and to stay healthy.  So when I’m not working and not with my kids, you can find me at the gym. A healthy body produces a great mind, so by being in good shape I’m actually able to do much more and also feel great at the same time. 

My other hobbies are actually not that healthy, but I love drinking beer. Especially with my Bulgarian part of the team haha. 

"I do always put family first, but I also see the DMXzone community as a family."   

Where do you see yourself and DMXzone in the next 15 years?

Continuing with what we do best: developing high quality extensions for Dreamweaver to help all the users who want to save time and trouble. Apart from this we want to keep improving our business by offering the best kind of support and content for Dreamweaver users, so that they will always have a place to go to share their knowledge and to learn even more. 

Do you want to add something for the DMXzone users? 

I just really want to thank them all for their support from the beginning. They are the main reason that I started DMXzone, and I hope there will be many more years to come where we can offer all of ours users a better Dreamweaver experience. 

Ena Zijadic

Ena has been focused on DMXzone's Marketing & Communication in 2015 and 2016 . She has played a role in the maintenance of our own website, social media, and managing the overall marketing for DMXzone.

See All Postings From Ena Zijadic >>

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