Web Development

I started out working with web back in the 1990’s using Front Page. At the time, I was working in Public Relations and Marketing for a movie production company. One of my duties was to Web Master the website. In those days, the internet was new. Not everyone had access to it. And software was pretty basic by today’s standards. 

There was little information about how to build a website, and I didn’t know HTML, so being a graphic designer that worked daily with PageMaker (the original InDesign), I tried a new product called FrontPage, and I launched the site. Back then, message boards were new, as were chatrooms. I remember going to my local college to take a class to better my skills. They told me I knew more than any of their instructors about Web Mastering, and they just gave me credit for the class. I spent months analyzing the code on some of the top entertainment sites in the country, and once I felt that I had learned enough, I launched both a message board and a live chatroom. (That was back in the days when there was no such thing as pre-fab software that made installing message boards and chatrooms easy.) In addition, we had a fully functioning store. And I worked remotely long before networking computers across the country was a thing.

I started out as a graphic designer, and have continued on in that role through the years. But the one thing that I really loved was Mastering the website. Life happened, and I had children to raise, so being in a small town, I took jobs that paid the bills. Then, in my 40’s I decided to carve out the career I really wanted for my life. I went back to school to learn Web Development the right way, starting with coding. I first enrolled in the local college in Web and Graphic Design, and went on for my Bachelor’s degree with University of Maryland Global Campus in Digital Media and Web Technology. My focus in the major has been coding, in addition to digital media.

Today, I have my own Web Development company where I mainly put-up educational websites and help non-profits that can’t afford to pay a high-end developer to install their site, and I work as the Web Developer/Administrative Specialist for an affiliate that assists the MDA and USDA. Of coarse, in the real world, most businesses and organizations want a website that can easily be updated by any staff member, so fully coding a site is not functional. Therefore, most of my websites are done in WordPress with software added to make them easy to update. But I love coding and am anxious to work at a job where I will be able to do more of it. I learned coding in HTML5 and I am good at CSS. I know basic JavaScript.