About Me

I joined "the information superhighway" back in 1995 when CompuServe was king, BBS systems were hip 'n' happ'nin' and Yahoo was still a pipe dream. Remember those days when 14.4k modems were state of the art, visitor counters were still cool, you couldn't email attachments unless you UUEncoded them first and the Internet was a wild uncontrolled universe ... happy days!

In 1995 I had also been working in I.T. for 10 years, starting off on a 20 MB PC programming in a 4GL called "DataFlex" for a small company in Felixstowe, Suffolk, U.K. Prior to that, I had first learned programming at a local college where I learned BASIC on a mainframe with no VDUs, just printer terminals with "music paper" printouts, our programs were stored on punched cards and the Commodore Pet was the latest thing.

In 1996 I married an American and moved from the U.K. to Northern California, living just outside Sacramento. It was there that I started programming in Visual Basic and, while employed at Prima Publishing, now part of Random House, that I first started developing web sites professionally, becoming Project Manager for all of Prima's web site development and internal application development. It was at Prima that I first became aware of many of the new web technologies and I.T. developments that are still being felt today ... including search engine optimization, online advertising, XML, data feeds and so on.

On leaving Prima, I began work as a full-time I.T. consultant, concentrating primarily on intranet and web-based application development.

Now, back in the U.K., where I have been since 2003, I have been continuing my I.T. consulting work and have concentrated mostly on search engine optimization, AdWords advertising and general web design & development. I also have a particular penchant for web usability and accessibility issues, having had quite a bit of prior experience with deaf and blind people ... in fact, I can read braille, though not by touch!

In 2005 I also graduated as valedictorian from Concord Law School in California. It was while studying cyberlaw that I had to create what is now my hobby site, PresLaw.net, "the legal legacy of Elvis Presley." My time in law school also piqued my particular interest in cyberlaw-related issues, with particular regard to intellectual property issues online (i.e. trademarks and copyrights).