For a long time I did “something with communication”: ideas, texts, advertising. After five years working for the best agency in Groningen I started Concept & Co, together with copywriter Wim Hoffmann. After a year and a half it turned out that it wasn’t going well between the two partners and I continued my business as Erik de Vries BV, Concept, Copy & Communicatie. Many successful and less successful years later I read that Aristotle once said that there is no communication if the recipient of your message does nothing with it and I thought damn, that’s a good one. In advertising, communication is mainly a lot of sending, in the hope that the recipients do something with it, in other words buy your junk. But actually you should sit in the recipient’s chair and see how he looks at your message, what it does to him and what he does with it.

Communication is only communication when there is interaction. I thought: that’s a nice one and decided to rebrand my company: e-rik interaction concepts. I continued to copywrite, come up with advertising concepts, create advertisements, folders, brochures and websites, but now under this new flag. Another crisis later I decided to change course and focus completely on building websites in WordPress, an emerging content management system at the time. That turned out to be a good choice. In no time at all my shop – now under the name WP Webbouw – went crescendo. The parent company remained e-rik interaction concepts, but the advertising branch led an almost dormant existence. I was much too busy building websites and I liked that much more than the copywriting that I had been doing for ages. Later I added a webhosting and WordPress website maintenance company, with which I could offer my customers a good basis for their WordPress website: I provided the technology and the support, so that they could run their business.

I still build a website every now and then, write or edit a text here and there, give an entrepreneur some advice and I have a nice collection of clients for whom I manage, host, maintain and troubleshoot their websites. I have known most of them for 10 years or longer.

In addition, I have more and more room for other fun things that I can call long-term passions: writing and producing music, and making furniture from wood.

I thought, hey, I can also count those two as “interaction concepts”. Ultimately, they are ways in which I interact with the world. I interact by learning, making, falling on my face, starting over and sometimes creating something that makes me very happy.

I was a math wiz at school. I even started studying it at university, but that quickly became too dry for me. I switched to Dutch and ended up not in front of the class but in marketing communications. Mathematics remained. When I see numbers I start calculating. I like geometry and stereometry. I especially like applied mathematics. Building websites, creating music and designing furniture all have a mathematical component. Maybe that is the overarching factor for me.

On this site I will tell you what I have learned, show you what I have made or am working on and sometimes I will reveal how I made it or hope I can make it.

e-rik.nl came into being after I missed out on the domain name erikdevries.nl. Not so strange, because there are about 600 copies of Erik de Vries in the Netherlands.
I thought e-rik.nl suited my work; not an everyday domain name, a bit challenging, I got quite a lot of nice comments about it. That’s how it became a keeper.