The Transformation of a Web Designer.

I’ve had a lot of people ask me about how I got started what I did and how they can start, hopefully this will clear a lot of that up.

I started tinkering with web design when I was 11 years old, back then there really where no good tools to make websites, All I had was Notepad+ and MS paint, everything had to be hand written and and trying to find HTML errors was a pain in the ass. There where no code formatting colors or alerts for when you left a table open (that’s right TABLE) and there was no CSS other then a few in-line styles for a form or table here and there.

Everything was styled indivdually and keeping each page identical (other then content) was damn near impossible.

Then my brother in law (David Hannon) got a copy of Macromedia Flash 5, and let me tell you I was BLOWN away.. I started making little animations then simple sites (that sucked BTW)  and I thought it was the best thing ever, so then sadly I went into my “EVERYTHING HAS TO BE FLASH PHASE” and for about a year the only sites I ever worked on where completely flash based, It was bad..

A little while after that I was looking for help on Macromedia’s website and I ran across two new programs I’ve never heard of before, Macromedia Fireworks, and Macromedia Dreamweaver, I downloaded a demo and quickly got confused and gave up, back to Notepad+ and MS Paint for me.

Probably another year went by as I started working, First I was a Dish Washer at a local restaurant (Bad Idea), Then I started working a Call Center in Osage Beach, I worked there for about 4 months until they had some major computer problems and I helped out, I did so well I got promoted to Director of IT, as they did not even have a IT team before me. Ok so Now I’m working in IT, this gave me a lot of time to tinker with computers while I was working and I started getting a better idea of coding and websites as I was required to make things for the company.

It was taking me a long time to get anything done in Notepad+ and MS Paint so I finally decided to crack down and start learning Fireworks and Dreamweaver, What a DIFFERENCE! It was like going from 1930 to 2005 in a few days, My sites where instantly better and much smaller thanks to Fireworks image compression.

So I kept making sites in Dreamweaver and Fireworks but I was making some big mistakes, First I was still in the mindset of making sites how I used to, and would start designing in Dreamweaver then adding graphics and stuff as I went, big mistake! took too long and sites where not what they could have been.

So now my family has decided to move to FL, I thought it would be nice to be in a city and really help my career so I decided to leave my job and move to FL, I started working in call centers again and finally got a job as a IT director at a local company, I needed to build sites pretty much all day at this job so I got a lot of experience, until the upgrade.

So about 8 months ago I made a big upgrade, I vowed to never use tables again (unless necessary) and to only use CSS for styling and get away from in-line, for some reason I was a little scared to move into this unknown and I did make some mistakes, but now I find coding in xHTML and CSS natural and would never do it any other way, TABLES SUCK.

Now I’m working on something new, WordPress. I’ve only made a few themes but they have come out great so far and I’m hoping to start making some themes and giving them away here on the site.