Hello! I'm Jasper Espejo,
and I make awesome WordPress websites.
and I make awesome WordPress websites.
I have been delivering professional WordPress design and development services to clients around the world since 2007. This is how I started...
I grew up in Vigan, a town about eight hours by bus north of Metro Manila, 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, all dating back from the 16th century.
In college, I studied Medical Technology but I realized belatedly during my internship that I did not really enjoy being around sick people. So after graduation, I immediately took a certificate in Fine Arts at the Baguio campus of the University of the Philippines.
Around the same time, I got to meet the amazing artists of the Baguio Arts Guild who held office at the Convention Center across the campus at that time. There I was introduced to the late great multimedia artist Santiago Bose who hired me to assist him with his some of his large artworks. Santi was one of the early adopters of digital art, and he let me play with his laptop’s image editing program to produce images that would be incorporated into his large canvas paintings. I became proficient in Adobe Photoshop to scan and digitally manipulate images.
Exploring the other software in his laptop, I came upon Netscape Composer. I quickly learned that I can make web pages using this tool. I searched the web for tutorials and stumbled upon Webmonkey where I religiously read about html. I decided right then that I wanted to master this new technology. To push me further, Santi decided that we should make a website for our artists group, the Baguio Arts Guild.
For days, I read about Flash, Fireworks and Dreamweaver (owned by the Macromedia company at that time) from various online tutorials. A few weeks of self-study resulted to one ugly (by my current standards) website, but that was the start of everything.
Three years after my jump into web design, I gathered enough web coding skills to land me a job in Manila under an American expat who ran a web design business from his home office. Within two years, the company was absorbed by a multinational market research firm and we were brought to Kuala Lumpur as part of a newly formed in-house web team tasked to update the company websites and to create online surveys.
After contract in KL expired, I returned to Manila to work for a series of US web design companies. But in 2007 I decided to go freelance. Since then, I have helped many local and foreign businesses to bring their presence online.
In 2018, with my father's passing, I returned to my hometown to manage the newspaper business he left behind. Although I am now far from the country's business center, I am still able to provide my web development services with the help of fast internet connection that is now finally available in my hometown. I have also started a small web hosting service to cater to local businesses in the region.
The internet has changed dramatically since I typed my first lines of code in Netscape Composer. I am often amazed at the speed that new technologies develop. It's no wonder that one must now have to go to school to learn a skill that took me only a few weeks to study over two decades ago. I do my best to keep up (still by reading online tutorials) because my love for creating websites is the one thing that has not changed.