I am a freelance web designer from the Philippines who loves designing unique WordPress sites for clients from here and abroad.

I currently reside in Manila, although I grew up in Vigan, a town about 200km north of the capital city of the Philippines. Vigan is a beautiful town, listed as one of UNESCO’s World Heritage Village because of the Spanish colonial houses and the old baroque church in the town center.

I studied Medical Technology but I belatedly realized that I did not enjoy being around sick people. I took another diploma in Fine Arts. After a few years hanging out with other artists, I learned that there’s not much money in it unless you’re exceptionally talented.

My life’s turning point came when I went to work for the late Santiago Bose. Helping him create his large paintings in the late 90s was the peak of my very short career in the arts. Santi was exposed to digital arts being produced by artists abroad and was keen on incorporating digitally manipulated images in his artworks. He let me play around with his computer’s image editing program to produce images that were eventually transferred to mixed-media paintings.

While exploring the installed programs in his laptop I came upon Netscape Composer and learned that I can make web pages with it. I searched the net for tutorials and stumbled upon Webmonkey where I religiously read about html. I decided right then that I wanted to learn this new technology. To push me further, Santi came up with the idea that we should make a website for Baguio Arts Guild. For days, I read about Macromedia Flash, Fireworks and Dreamweaver from various online tutorials.

A few weeks of self-study resulted to this (WARNING: the browser might popup an old realplayer plugin, that’s no virus so don’t panic.) This is one ugly website but it is where everything started.

Three years later, my web design skills brought me to Manila to work for an American expat. We created websites from a small home office. Another year later, my awesome skills brought me to Kuala Lumpur for a two-year stint in a market research company, as in-house web manager. For two years I updated the company websites and helped create online surveys for clients like Mandarin Oriental.

More than ten years later and after working for several web design companies, I decided to go freelance and am now working from home helping foreign and Filipino clients bring their businesses online.

The internet has changed dramatically since I typed my first lines of code in Netscape Composer. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with new technologies. No wonder young kids now have to go to school to learn a profession that took me only a few weeks to master over 14 years ago. But despite the explosion of new technologies, I try my best to keep up (still by reading online tutorials) because my love for creating websites is the one thing that has not changed. I am happy that after a few career dead-ends, I eventually discovered a profession that I truly enjoy doing.