I completed a Bachelor degree in Information Technology Systems (completed in 1999) at a time when the World Wide Web was in its infancy and largely the realm of science and IT students.
Being tasked to “look after” a website as part of a role in quality assurance in the year 2000, before courses in web development existed, I devoured books and resources on everything from programming, design, user experience, information architecture, and search engine optimization (SEO), developing a love of organizing information online in a user friendly, accessible way. I have built websites personally and commercially ever since, initially hand-coding and programming them all, as well as working with a range of content management systems (including MySource, MySource Matrix, Joomla and Drupal), of which WordPress has been my primary platform of choice for many years now.
From this same time, I was active in building effective online communities before social media became a thing. I’ve lost count of the social media platforms I’ve been on! Before Facebook, Yahoo Groups were the premier platform for online communities, and I built the biggest and most effective community for Rotaract, “RotaractNET”.
With over 20 years of commercial website development experience, of which 9 were spent at the University of Western Australia working across all the faculties and administrative areas, I built a reputation as a usability and accessibility expert with demonstrable SEO skills. I have received several awards for my websites.
After leaving UWA I started my own freelance web development business; in recent years I have chosen to primarily work in the music teaching industry (and have launched online courses and coaching under The Succesful Music Studio). I still build several new websites each year and maintain a number, including my own music teaching website, which is optimised to rank highly on the first page of a Google search. While I no longer maintain a portfolio of my old websites, I have been compiling one with more recent sites.
I have completed 3 LinkedIn Skill Assessments on my LinkedIn profile, and earned badges in them all:
- SEO: top 30% of 2.3 million people
- HTML: top 15% of 3.7 million people
- Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): top 5% of 1.9 million people
I’ve been online for the entire evolution of websites and social media, embracing both as fantastic ways to organise information and enable effective communication and collaboration within communities.
I became the go-to person for building online communities and social media in several organisations, and consequently spent many years providing training all over the world, from short presentations to key note speeches and multi-day workshops. I have compiled many of those social media resources here.
These days I run at least one face-to-face workshop / webinar every year, and am building up my suite of online courses.