The Time Has Come
I have spent the last 18 years of my life working in IT and in the creative arts. It was only 3 years ago that I discovered my passion for web design. Looking back it should have been obvious, but to me, it was a revelation. When I was younger I had high hopes of becoming a professional drummer (Whatever that means). I spent every minute I could creating and rehearsing. I even spent a year in Tulsa, OK of all places playing with a band (The Hero Factor), and we were pretty good! One weekend we loaded up a couple of vans with a bunch of gear and drove down to Oklahoma City to record an EP at a friend’s studio and I found myself totally captivated by the recording process. It wasn’t like I was ever going to give up being a drummer, but I had a new spark lit in me. I could blend the creativity of music with the technical knowledge required to engineer an album and reach a whole new level of engagement. I’ll just say one thing lead to another and I left for CA to pursue production and anything technical I could learn about. I ended up at a local church as their IT administrator and Sound, Video, Lighting director. I learned so much in those early years in the bay area. Tech was everywhere and the dot com boom and busts fueled my excitement even more. Skip ahead to 2007 and my wife and I moved back to Rockford, IL to start a family. I have continued to keep up with IT and production, having spent a few years doing network engineering for a local IT Solutions company, and then taking a job at a fairly large church overseeing all their live production and communications. 3 years ago the church leadership decided their website needed to be updated, and I guess I must have opened my mouth the most in those conversations because they basically looked at me like “OK Aaron, you have opinions about this… It’s yours.” With that, I jumped in and learned everything I could about WordPress, HTML5, and CSS, and started hacking away at their WordPress theme. 3 years of schooling, 2 website versions, and a number of side jobs later, and I’ve decided it’s time to jump into web design with every extra second I can find. I’m hoping I’ll be able to find some decent gigs and meet some great people while trying to build a clean beautiful website for those that want my help.