I find this page the most difficult to write... I can go on for hours about various aspects of web design and other topics of interest, but I never know what to say about myself. It's not that there isn't a lot to say, but exactly how much do I want to put on the Internet??
I do want my clients to know me personally because that is important to the way I do business so I'll start there. I'm in my early 30s and a mother of five boys--I have two adopted sons from Russia that are currently high-school aged. My husband and I adopted them when they were 8 and 10. The older boy visited us for six weeks in the summer of 2000 through a program called Kidsave International Summer Miracles. We fell in love and started proceedings to adopt him and his younger brother, who we hadn't met yet. We finally got through all the red tape and went to Russia in March of 2001 to go through the adoption court there. They have an older sister, Tanya, who is 20 or 21 and is disabled. She is still in Russia in a nursing home but we are trying to get her out and bring her to live with us here in the States. Easier said than done!
My other older boys came to live with us in 2005 from our local area. The eldest will be attending Keene State College this fall and his younger brother is in high school. That's probably all that they would want me to write about them! My youngest is Andy, a pre-schooler.
I am a New Hampshire native but spent my high school years in Santa Barbara, where I had the opportunity to take college classes in high school. I ended up graduating early because I'm a colossal nerd-geek. :) That said, if you, my reader, are an honors-level high schooler or a parent with an advanced child, I highly recommend considering taking college courses at a local community college (or 4 year school if you can afford it!) while in high school. It not only gets you ahead of the game, but gives you a different perspective when considering what schools you may want to attend after high school.
After high school I came back home to New England and went to Boston University's School of Education where I studied education before becoming entranced by computers and the Internet and changing my major. This was back before AOL even got online and websites were a new thing and my 14.4kbps dial-up modem and 386MHz computer with a 100MB hard drive was sufficient for all that I needed. The world sure has changed since then--I am still amazed whenever I turn on my phone and start browsing websites from a car zipping along the highway (in the passenger seat, of course!!).
I was a late adopter of cell phones with real web access (as opposed to those with a 1" x 1" screen)--At the time of this writing, I only got my first one as a gift from my father-in-law (who is always on the bleeding edge when it comes to cameras and cell phones) just a couple months ago. Now I can't imagine living without it. The web still has a long way to go, though, before it's really ready for mobile access. Some websites, like Amazon, Yahoo, and Google have gone out of their way to make their sites handheld-accessible, but others just turn out tiny and difficult to use at best, a complete disaster at worst.
Because of my experience recently with the web via phone, I am now making all of the sites I design or manage handheld-compatible to the best degree possible. It's going to take a long time to update them all, though! Fortunately, I found out that with the clean design I always use anyway, the sites I have already designed can be navigated slowly but legibly--at least with my Centro. I hate the tiny keyboard, though! I have to use my fingernails to type and even then I sometimes fat-finger the keys. But it was a gift, so I'm thrilled with it. ;)
In 1998 I started a web hosting business named Web Serve Pro. Over the next six years we grew our datacenter to over 125 servers and, although still considered a small company, we were known for the high quality of our services. 80% of our new business was generated through customer referrals. One of our main selling points was that we knew what every single one of our 1500+ clients did for business and what their needs were--when someone called we knew--without looking the information up--who they were. We were only able to accomplish this with a top-notch group of individuals that I prided myself on. In 2004, after the birth of my son Andy, I decided to scale back dramatically and sold the bulk of the company to another local provider, keeping only a few hosting accounts that were local or for which I did design work.
Since then, I have continued to do web development for a few local businesses and individuals and to host websites on dedicated servers with LiquidWeb, a company that I have found to be extremely reliable in both uptime, network performance, and technical support. By outsourcing the datacenter management (my husband and I still manage the actual servers), I find that I am able to provide the same or even a better level of hosting service while being able to maintain the personal touch that proved so valuable on a larger scale.