Where did the name “FontLife” come from?
Most assume that I came up with this meaningful single-word trademark to describe my business endeavors, but rest assured, I’m not that clever. The credit all goes to the wife of my first Pastor in Bayonne, NJ, Nancy Zeron. When we learned that Sue and I were expecting our child, whenever we saw Nancy, she would give Sue a hug and say she was “carrying FontLife.” To me, FontLife will always be a reference to our daughter Victoria and health struggles my beautiful wife faced as the pregnancy progressed. FontLife is our miracle baby. The name stuck and is not only a reference to Tori, but has become a major part of my business life.
This site is my first real website. The fontlife.com domain name was registered on July 30, 2003. It was slow going at first, but I wrote anything that popped into my simple mind just to see where it would go. Imagine my shock to learn that I actually had about 500 people a month reading my blog posts! Six years later, in October 2009, the site received over 3,000 unique visitors. Not only was that an answer to prayer, but it was an encouragement to continue writing my first book, The Ultimate Guide to the SDLC. Writing any book is hard, but writing a highly technical 400+ page tome with hand drawn diagrams, flow charts, and process maps is like scaling Mount Everest. I was frustrated and thought many times about throwing the project into the trash.
Then I prayed. I asked God to help me to understand what His will is regarding my writing. Prior to that October, I never received more than 500 unique visitors to this site. Out of the frustration over the book’s progress, I specifically asked God to send at least 3,000 readers to my site in October. I put my fleece before the Lord and He answered BIG time.
The idea of “putting out a fleece” comes from the story of Gideon, a leader in Israel, in Judges 6:36-40. God directed him to gather the Israelite troops to defeat the Midianite invaders, but Gideon hesitated. He wanted to be sure it was really God’s voice he was hearing and that he understood His directions. He asked God for a sign to prove that this was truly His will. So he put out a “fleece of wool” overnight and asked God to make it wet while keeping the surrounding dirt dry. God graciously did as Gideon asked, and in the morning the fleece was wet enough to produce a bowl of water when it was wrung out.
After God answered my prayer in October, the website traffic returned to its normal 500 or so visitors. I had my answer from God and continued writing. Since then, I have written 14 books, and manage 4 websites. One is for my book, The Ultimate Guide to the SDLC, a second is for my IT Consulting company, Victor Font Consulting Group, LLC., the third is for my publishing business, which I’m reinventing at the moment. That site is FontLife Publications, LLC. The last is this site. And I’m sorry to admit that I’ve neglected things here. It’s time for me to start writing again and ramp up the efforts.
All of these sites use the same logo, which is the image seen above on the right. No, it’s not the Alpha and Omega as some have suggested. One day, I was playing around in Adobe Illustrator and decided to try my hand at merging two letters into one. The two letters that are merged together in the logo are “F” and “L” in some symbol font. The “F” and “L” stands for FontLife.
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