About Me
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 mid 30s and a mother of five boys—I have two adopted sons from Russia, adopted when they were 8 and 10, and two foster sons. They are all between 17 and 20 as I write this. Like most young people who put far too much information of their own on social networking sites, they’d rather their mother not talk about them online, so that’s all I’ll say about them!
My youngest and only biological child is Andy, who is six and in kindergarten this year. Andy is my future mathematician, he’s been adding, subtracting, and multiplying everything he can think of since he was four— and maybe before that, he didn’t talk until he was 3 so I’m not sure what he was thinking back then. I’m afraid I may someday face the daunting task of parenting a 7th grader doing Calculus! Or perhaps not–he’s not interested in reading yet (which breaks my heart, I’m a consummate bookworm!), so he may take a long time to get to word problems. ;)
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 graduated 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 and computer science. This was back before AOL even got online and websites weren't quite invented yet–my 14.4kbps dial-up modem and 386MHz computer with a 100MB hard drive were sufficient for all that I needed. The world sure has changed since then–I still occasionally take time out to marvel at technology when I turn on my phone and start browsing websites from a car zipping along the highway (in the passenger seat, of course!!).
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 recruiting, training, and retaining. In 2004, after Andy was born, 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 run a few of my own websites on a dedicated server with LiquidWeb, a company that I have found to be extremely reliable in both uptime, network performance, and technical support— and they didn't even pay me to say that. ;) My primary focus right now is on providing freelance sub-contract work to other development firms, mostly PSD to HTML/CSS work, but many other miscellaneous tasks as well.