I first started making websites in the mid-1990s when I was in college in an English class led by a Professor who was very progressive, and swore that this was the future of communication. No one knew how right he was, and I had no idea this would become a life-long endeavor at the time.
The first websites that we made back then bore very little resemblance to the web that we know today. There was no such thing – at least not to my knowledge – of something like WordPress, or even editors that could edit pages while showing you what they would look like. We used text editors in a text-only environment to write HTML code. Even web browsers were nothing like what we are used to today. We would invoke the web browser by typing a command into the console, and navigation was done using the arrow keys, and hyperlinks (now known simply as “links”) would be highlighted. The arrow keys would take you from one link to the next on the page.
We would later come back to school the next year, and we found our old tiny green-screened terminals were replaced by much more colorful and larger terminals. These terminals had a graphical user interface and were mouse-driven. The familiar text-based web browser had been replaced by a new shiny web browser that could display images and text alongside each other.
Fast forward a few years, and I found myself out of college with a degree that I had no idea how to find a job with. A close friend of mine told me about an internship at his company coding HTML. I was surprised to find that knowing this simple markup language was now a marketable skill. This company was later bought by AOL, and I was offered a full-time job as a web developer.
Since then, I continued to work in the field as a webmaster for various organizations and kept learning new skills along the way. HTML editors gave way to content-management systems, not unlike WordPress, which I use to create websites like this one. As the internet grew, so did the field of web development, and there were many other jobs besides developer and designer.
In 2015, I landed a job as a web project manager for a large media company that had made the transition from a newspaper company to a web design company. In this role, I learned everything I know about the business of making websites from a customer-facing role. I took the needs of businesses and would translate these needs into technical specifications for our design and development teams.
In 2018, when this company lost a partnership with an organization I was hired to support, I found myself without employment. The bright side for me was that I now knew everything I needed to know to help individuals and organizations to be more successful, and I am now here to put the knowledge and experience to help you grow your business.
