When I was just a little girl (30 years before I decided to open my own Design agency), my mother was a graphic artist who had her own Ad Agency called Page One. My sister and I would spend hours there during school holidays and after school. The agency was such a magical place! I knew one day I wanted my very own agency; complete with a boardroom with a huge whiteboard and a telecom system!

Flash forward a few years to when I was in my early teens. We had just had the internet installed at home, and my I had a group of friends who were really into HTML pages. I learned bits of HTML and made my very own web pages. Of course, they were full of psychedelic and spinning happy face .gifs which were popular in the mid 90’s. Through these simple setups, I mastered HTML, and was hooked.

A Little Bit Later…

A few years later, when I was 17, my mother decided to put me to work. My job consisted of typesetting brochures, advertisements and magazines. Each day, my mother gave me a new Photoshop task to learn the Adobe program. Pretty soon I was designing advertisements for newspaper and magazines and I got to sit in on client meetings. During this time I was still designing HTML/CSS pages for me and my friends. Most of the webpages I was building were for bands.

All Grown Up…

At the age of 20, I emigrated to England… In 2002 I gave birth to my daughter and spent the next 5 years as a stay-at-home-mum. It had been the first time since I started working that I had been without a paying job, and I put my Agency dream on hold. In 2010 I started using WordPress.  I started a home-based business based around affiliate, CPA marketing so that I could bring in income and still be there for my daughter when she got home from school.

I would build pages and write content, for the sites and also publish as articles for Article Marketing.. This was also my first experience with SEO. Having learned HTML and CSS all those years ago gave me an advantage (I didn’t realise it at the time). I was able to customise those free templates for WordPress. I also relied heavily on my Graphic Design background to create logos and advertisements for these sites I was building. During this time I also did some freelance Graphic Design as a side-job to earn more income for my little family.

At the time, WordPress was pretty much a blogging platform, but I saw the potential there to make WordPress look the same as a standard HTML site, and that’s just what I did! I never thought that what I was doing was to become the future of WordPress.

The Future

Here I am almost 30 years later, that little girl playing in her mother’s Ad agency a distant memory. However, I am on my way to achieving my lifelong dream of having my very own, hustle and bustle agency. An agency that not only offers WordPress services but can handle anything web related, Graphic Design, Branding, Copywriting and all sorts of Marketing!

I’ve just completed a degree in Computing from UCLAN School of Computing, Engineering and Physical Sciences. It was an extensive degree program and I graduated with Merit. Some of the modules I studied further my already required abilities. The ones I think helped me the most are UX design, Dynamic Web, Rapid Application Development using Agile Development methodologies and c++ Programming.