About William On Web Inc.
WilliamOnWeb Inc. is us -- we're a tiny company based in Vancouver BC, formed in 2006 to create and market the software introduced in 2007 as the Spreadsheet Shakespeare and the WoW Edition of Shakespeare's plays. We're currently four people working out of our homes, two more of us in my basement office with dicey web connections, three or four computers, five or six wide screens (it depends where the one MacBook Pro is employed among the PC's), and we've no intention of growing bigger.
Most of us are in our prime (not to say ripe) and this is a retirement "legacy" project -- to make us memorable (not rich); please bear in mind our aging bones and my thick skull when you contact us at Info@WilliamOnWeb.com. Do contact us, though: we plan a fine reward system for contributions to help better the Spreadsheet Shakespeare.
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Our People: The owner and founder is writing this: I'm Lionel Lukin Johnston. My diverse career's been mostly in the professional theatre (highlight two years with the RSC in London and a European tour); computer programming and 
systems analysis (eight years, few highlights); and seven years publishing about AutoCAD as founding editor of CADalyst magazine. I designed and built the Spreadsheet Shakespeare template and coded or specified all its remarkable automated features. This is my baby! Initially conceived during a 1982 personal exercise in Basic and SuperCalc, the products have emerged through QuattroPro and WordPerfect with planned distribution on CD -- never implemented -- to their present forms in MS-Office 2003 WORD and EXCEL, with distribution by individual email attachment.
I've had a great deal of help with all the central project's supporting structure. Our script editors are both college friends of mine from UBC Theatre in the sixties.
Living on Gabriola Island, Patricia Ludwick (for years a successful professional actress and playwright, now a dramaturge, film script editor and teacher) has taken on the heavy responsibility for our overall textual accuracy and our strike-through-cut acting editions of Shakespeare's plays. Patricia doesn't really want to know what our spreadsheet does -- or any spreadsheet, for that matter -- but she'll defend the integrity of Shakespeare's plays against all comers.
Working closely with her, Sandra Walton (a talented local artist and sculptor, making her living in several ways) brings the error-ridden but free public-domain play texts into line with their jointly-created style guide, and then she formats the resulting scripts in MS Word. Sandra argues passionately with me about what we're doing (to your great benefit) and wishes with justification that I was a better manager.
Melanie Ray (another dear Vancouver friend, a spell-binding professional story-teller who needed a job for some cash and was my first hiring) is doing our data creation. She patiently counts Hamlet's lines in Act V and copies Juliet's entrances into the data entry templates for the plays, then presents me with a daily list of insoluble problems of Shakespearean textual inconsistency and goes home...
David Cooper, Canada's leading theatrical photographer (studio website), did our photo shoot.
Scott Klarenbach at PointyHat Software, a thriving independent software developer, contributes elegant VBA code modules that are so beyond my aging Basic skills, let's all hope they never need maintenance.
Our "Willy" images at the foot of each page are doctored photos of the "Shakespeare Little Thinker" dolls we use as corporate gifts, used by permission of the Unemployed Philosophers Guild of Brooklyn NY, who sell great Shakespeare stuff. Quotes found by thumbing through Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations".
Our website design and services are provided by Thinking Cap, another proud Vancouver-based supplier to William on Web.
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