Hello! I'm Jasper Espejo,
and I make awesome WordPress websites.
and I make awesome WordPress websites.
I have been providing professional WordPress design and development services to clients worldwide since 2007. Here's the story of how it all began...
I grew up in Vigan, a charming town about eight hours by bus from Metro Manila, the capital of the Philippines. Vigan is amazing—it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Village, known for its Spanish colonial houses and an old baroque church in the town center, some of which date back to the 16th century.
In college, I studied Medical Technology, but during my internship, I realized hospitals weren’t really my thing. After graduating, I shifted gears and took a certificate course in Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines in Baguio because I’ve always loved drawing and painting.
It was in Baguio that I met the incredible artists of the Baguio Arts Guild. Their office was conveniently across from the UP campus at the Convention Center. That’s where I crossed paths with the late, great multimedia artist Santiago Bose. He hired me to help with some of his artworks, and working with him was life-changing. Santi was one of the pioneers of using computers to aid the art process, and he let me experiment with his laptop’s image editing program to produce images that could be useful for his paintings. That’s how I became proficient in Adobe Photoshop, learning to scan and manipulate images digitally.
One day, while exploring his laptop, I stumbled across Netscape Composer and realized I could make web pages with it. Intrigued, I scoured the internet for tutorials and found Webmonkey (my go-to resource for learning HTML back then). I was hooked and decided to master web design. To up the ante, Santi suggested we create a website for the Baguio Arts Guild.
For weeks, I immersed myself in learning Flash, Fireworks, and Dreamweaver (back when Macromedia owned them). After countless hours of self-study, I managed to put together a website. Looking back, it was far from perfect (okay, it was ugly by my standards now), but it marked the beginning of my web design journey.
Three years later, I had built enough coding skills to land a job in Manila with an American expat running a home-based web design business. Within two years, that company was acquired by a multinational market research firm, and I found myself in Kuala Lumpur as part of their web team, maintaining company websites and creating online surveys.
When my KL contract ended, I returned to Manila to work for foreign-owned web design companies. But by 2007, I decided to go freelance, helping local and international businesses establish their online presence.
In 2018, my father passed away, and I had to return to my hometown Vigan to manage the newspaper business he left behind. Despite being away from the country’s business hub, I’ve been able to continue offering web development services, thanks to the fast internet now available in my hometown. I’ve even started a small web hosting service to support local businesses in the region.
It’s incredible how much the internet has evolved since I first coded with Netscape Composer. These days, you’d need formal schooling for what I picked up in just a few weeks over two decades ago. I still keep up with the latest technologies (mostly through online tutorials), but one thing hasn’t changed: my love for creating websites.