A little known fact about me is that I used to be a Radiographer for nearly 25 years, working in a hospital and private practice. That now seems so long ago. I left that industry when after having been qualified to do my job all those years ago, some bright spark decided they now wanted me to have a license to operate for $$ per year and be registered by a national body – also for $$$ per year. Money grabbing! So I left.
So how did I end up being a web developer?
My first ever computer was a huge hefty thing with 2 floppy disk drives. I think this was about 1977. I managed to actually work that thing out and put floppies in and out and save my 512KB of data. (Or whatever tiny amount of data they held). Not long after I bought a computer with ‘First Choice’ – wow, it had a database and a Word processor! And a couple of games! We of course had 3 boys along the way and they also played those games.
But my real move into what I now do was when my husband and I owned a timber yard in Brisbane and I saw that other businesses had a website so I wanted to build something for our business. It was a case of ‘don’t put that price online, someone will see it!!!’ And you can’t have the opposition checking you out!!! But I was adamant people wanted to see prices so they could determine how much things were going to cost them.
My niche within my website then was a packaged quote system for building timber pergolas and decks. I loved playing with that and we had so many people would come into our yard and say ‘give me all of those things’ – they could take everything they needed and get their pergola/deck built, all based on how I had set that website up. From there, I decided that our ‘surname’ needs a travel website, someone else asked me to build a website, etc and it went from there.
I loved doing all those things back then and I still do! But today there is so much to learn all the time and so many integrated platforms and social media services plus marketing and online research – and every customer needs something different.
It’s chaos most days but I now have systems in place and automated reminders and invoicing etc, to hopefully make life a little easier. And yes, there are some very frustrating times as well.
So now – I’m a Web Developer, I build websites, upgrade older sites, acquire domain names for clients, help sort email issues, provide website hosting, etc, etc – the list goes on!
But as they say, if you love what you do, it’s not a job!