About the Author
Web design is both my hobby and my obsession. Over the past decade, I have taught myself everything I can about it. I am always interested in learning more things I can implement into my own work. Almost unconsciously, I find myself analyzing nearly every web site I visit for form and function.
As a child, I most loved to build and design LEGO and BRIO constructs. I love creative design; I think I was born to do it. I was always keen at art and design, and I began to doodle floor plans for buildings, design my own comic book characters, and draft levels for video games. Like many children of my generation, video games were a big hobby, but over the years, I noticed that my biggest gaming interests were in design and strategy games like SimCity or Civilization.
With the advent of HTML and the WWW, a whole new world opened up for me; I became totally enamored with it, and have never been the same. I vividly remember the first webpage I ever saw, www.webcrawler.com, and how I wanted to search and explore everywhere. I was young and thought that I could visit every page on the Internet, given enough time.
Later, I learned the basics of the markup language and then went further and launched myself into a full-scale personal research project to learn everything about it that I could. I studied the source code of other's web sites to dissect them and gobbled up other HTML reference I could find. In order to better teach myself, I created my own HTML reference website.
In my early twenties, I found myself working for a computer and software retail store. This afforded me with broad experience to hardware, as I had to have in-depth knowledge about our products so as to be able to answer customers' questions.
From time to time, I have found myself involved in personal projects with challenges that no one else seemed to have encountered or for which no one had yet made a solution. I then took it upon myself to learn the necessary skills to create my own solutions. Basically, some solutions required a tool or technique that I didn't have knowledge or skill in. So I would personally research and learn what I needed to complete the project.
For example, I learned and taught myself all about functions, conditional formatting, and macros in Excel in order to create interactive documents for household tools for bookkeeping, chores, and bills. Later, I taught myself how to manage and design forums as a member of an online gaming community. I've also learned some Visual Basic in order to make small programs to process data for players in an online game. I even grappled the basics of Photoshop to create graphics, as well as host them, for my online game community.
For most of my twenties, I continued my obsession of learning about computers and web design. My hobby provided me with enjoyment in front of my computer: learning, creating, and designing different interactive webpages, banners and logos, and even moderating forums for an online gaming community.
In 2007, I enrolled in the Web Design Program at ECPI. I became a member of the Web Design Club and provided some help setting rules for the ECPI Web Club Galleries Contests. My diligence also earned me a membership in Phi Theta Kappa National Honors Society. In addition, the school faculty honored me by voting me student of the term. I am proud of the achievements I made while attending school, reflected here in this online portfolio.