A little about me…

1998 I earned my first Associates of Applied Science Animal Technology (aka ranch management) degree.  I did not find any work in this but really enjoyed doing graphics on the computer and I wanted to learn the Microsoft Office programs. My other hobbies include photography, dogs (raising and training my Border Collies, Canine Freestyle), doing Animal Assisted Therapy, raising and breeding Palomino Rabbits, having sheep, going for old car rides, and much more. 

2001 I went after my second AAS degree this time as an Administrative Assistant with an emphasis on web design and Microsoft Office programs (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and FrontPage). I also learned HTML.  I received that degree in 2003. 

After I got my degree I did teacher aide work and kitchen duties in a nearby school district.  After my son was born in 2006 I knew that I wanted to stay home with him.  It so happened that in 2004 my father-in-law needed to make a career change from a sandblaster to something less demanding on his body and health.  My husband and I got together with my in-laws and helped them develop a class that my father-in-law could teach at our local community college.  His long time experience was in restoring vintage automobiles so that is the class he teaches at the local community college.  We helped get the curriculum together and I showed them how to do PowerPoint’s as teaching aids.  As the class got more popular they started teaching a couple of other classes out of their shop, renting out their paint booth, do car consultations, and renting out spaces for other people to restore cars. 

Towards the latter part of 2007 we decided to have a website put together.  I had some experience but was not confident enough to get a website created for them.  A class member put it together and then I was to maintain it.  I found out that the class member had much less experience than I did so I figured if he could do it then so could I.  As I started maintaining the www.beckersauto.com website, made a site for me, and one for our car club I researched which program I wanted to use.  The class member suggested Dreamweaver or NVU but I had learned FrontPage so when I went to relearn it I discovered that Microsoft had done away with FrontPage and had launched Expression Web.  I downloaded trial versions of Dreamweaver, NVU, and Expression Web.  It wasn’t long before I was engulfed in Expression Web, having my in-laws buying it for me (in exchange for doing their website), buying Total Training tutorials, and finding online tutorials.  I really liked Expression Web because even though it was a far cry from FrontPage it was still an obvious choice because Microsoft kept with the main setup of all their other Office programs. 

2008 I got Expression Web, the tutorials, and started self-teaching Expression Web and relearning Photoshop.  I chose to completely revamp my in-laws website because it was a complicated, fairly large (over forty pages), and would give me the best hands on training.  I had to learn DWTs, about CSS, how to make my own buttons and optimize photos with Photoshop.