Biography
Animated flowers bloomed in the margins and the classic starfield background twinkled behind purple Comic Sans content. Admittedly, my first website looked like the work of a 12-year-old girl--that's because it was.
Throughout junior high I used my personal website as a playground to learn web development and in high school I completed my first batch of freelance web development tasks--my high school's website, my county's tourism website, and PurplePJs.com (an online magazine for teenage girls).
My involvement with PurplePJs developed into much more than a coding gig. My SEM work and standards-compliant code helped the site's traffic skyrocket 600%. Today, while the site's content is ultimately run by a team of 50+ columnists and editors, I continue to support the site as both mentor and web developer.
As a college sophomore, I moved into my sorority's chapter house and promptly redesigned the aged website. I lived just across the hall from a blind member of our sorority who invited me to listen in as she surfed the newly-designed website. I was embarrassed to discover that my polished design was a cumbersome jumble for her to navigate.
I forced myself back to square-one and relearned how to code--this time, focusing on standards-compliance, accessibility, and search engine marketing.
In 2005 I accepted a web developer position with FindLaw. In my first two years with FindLaw, I transformed over 1000 Photoshop designs into accessible standards-compliant websites. I've since been promoted to a position where I spend less time coding and more time orchestrating the efforts of both in-house developers and off-shore vendors. I still crave the raw catharsis of coding, an appetite I feed through freelance web development.