|
About
Karen McCullough...
After
fifteen years as a computer programmer, including a stint as head
developer for an early version of a bar-coded warehouse inventory
management system, Karen McCullough realized she was burnt out on
COBOL and BASIC when she started dreaming lines of code. She made
a career change and became a writer and editor, eventually working
for a trade publishing company as associate editor and managing
editor. In the mid-1990s, that company decided it was time to venture
out onto the Internet. Because of her technical background, they
asked her to spearhead the effort to develop web sites for all their
publications.
At
that time, she knew nothing about how to build web sites, though
she had already visited many of them in this exciting new information
universe. In fact, Karen had been online since the late 1980s, being
an early member of the Prodigy service. The facts that a 2400-baud
modem was considered screamingly fast at that time and each page
took over two minutes to load limited the enjoyment, but she still
got a sense from it of the possibilities. She hung around various
bulletin board services, delighting in the discovery that it could
connect you with people having shared interests all over the world.
Undaunted
by her lack of knowledge of web development, she got a book that
promised to teach you HTML in 24 hours and then picked the brains
of everyone she knew who had experience on the web. A year later,
she had set up basic sites for all of the company's magazines. Over
the next year, she continued to refine them, adding content and
new functions. She soon realized she'd need more than HTML to make
happen everything she wanted the sites to do. Fortunately, she also
soon discovered that her background in BASIC programming made ASP
looked like an old friend.
Not
long after that a much larger trade publishing company lured her
away to set up sites for its magazines. She spent the next five
years, developing the one existing very, very basic site into a
group of half a dozen sites that served up daily news to their industries
and drew a total of over a million visitors a year.
At
the same time she began designing sites for a few fellow authors
and realized she enjoyed working on her own far more than she liked
working for an enormous multi-national publishing company with its
enormous corporate bureacracy.
She
retired from the corporate world and now is living her dream of
working independently.
If
you're interested in discussing having her do a site for you, feel
free to email
her at karen@kmccullough.com
|