I know there are a million blogs on web design, and still I've decided to create another.  Much of this has to do with trying to figure out MT 4.0, but most of it has to do with me keeping my links, thoughts, etc. in order.

I'm new to this field.  I became interested in building web pages several years ago with Front Page, but didn't venture into coding until I started a Blogger blog, about three years ago.  I would play around with the design -- with some comically bad results -- but didn't really take it seriously until about a year ago.  My husband and I were living in Prague, where I taught pre-school English, and we were thinking about the fact that our time was almost up and we would be returning to the states soon.  I couldn't stand the thought of trying to find work in telecom, where I worked before our year-long excursion overseas, and so I spent a few weeks trying to decide what career path I wanted to follow once we were back in Dallas.

In previous incarnations, I worked in tech support, customer service, and as a travel agent, none of which sounded any more appealing than telecom.  As for teaching pre-school -- let's just say that while I loved the kids, I've developed a great appreciation of the special talents required for managing large groups of children and for the fact that I don't possess those talents.

Then I realized that when I wasn't at the school or at the local Pivnice drinking good Czech beer with my husband, I was constantly (and happily) re-building my blog -- that's when I had a clue as to what I wanted to do.

I read up on classes, got books, read other blogs about design and development, and started building little blog templates for Blogger as a learning experience.  I put them up for free here, and kept trying to teach myself more complicated work.  I learned the difference between coding a web site and a blog, studied and worked and managed to talk a few people into letting me design their blogs.

Back in Dallas, the job hunt was on and in between sending out resumes for what I already had experience in, I sent them out to a few web design groups as well -- wouldn't hurt, I thought.  A couple of months later, I got a call from a local media company in response to my resume, and was given the great opportunity to work for them, even with my limited experience.

I've been with that company for seven months, now, and feel more than ever that this is the right path for me.  It's rewarding, challenging, and the right combination of technical and creative that I love.  In light of all of this, I've decided to create this blog mostly for my own personal needs -- to keep better track of blogs and journals I like to read, online tools, etc. and also just to follow my own progress.  It's nice to look back at what I was doing a year ago and compare it with what I'm doing now, and I'm sure I'll be doing even better work in the future. 

Dallas is a great place to be for this kind of work, as well...I'm excited that we are living here.  With the downtown renovation and arts activity, here, there will be tons of local inspiration and I look forward, every day, to seeing more...and maybe eventually setting up a web design meetup, to see if all the notices I get in my email about the others who would like a meetup group really mean it.  Might be fun!