Before knowing what the Internet was, I was still online, but through multiple local bulletin board systems (BBS), some of which I operated. For those who do not know what a BBS is, think of a discussion forum or chat room. It was set up so that you would set your computer to call a certain phone number to log in and meet other people.

I got into that in the mid-1980's, shortly after getting involved with my first network marketing company. I was looking for a way to promote it to more people without having to drive around putting up posters everywhere.

One day while on one of the BBS's I saw a message that said we should check out the new web page on the Internet. I wondered what the heck is the Internet? So I found a company that provided a dial-up service which allowed me to connect to any site I wanted to. Once I saw the web page with its graphics and links, I thought that was a much better way to advertise than a text-based BBS with limited users.

Once I was at a friend's house who had access to something called CompuServe. No mouse was used to navigate, only text commands were used to navigate. That really confused me so I went home and started doing what is now known as surfing. I was hooked on this whole Internet idea and wanted to learn how people put those pages up there. So I soon discovered that I could look at the page source to see how it was done.

By 1994 I was designing my own websites and even won an award for one of them from some company is known as Best of the Planet People's Choice Awards. That offered encouragement to keep going and learn more. By 1998 I decided to open my own website hosting company so that others could put their websites online too. With that, my hosting would be free and maybe, just maybe, I could make a little money from their monthly fees.

Today I can look back at my earlier designs using the Way Back Machine and am stunned at what used to be considered worthy of an award. That was not enough for me though. I wanted more... much more. I wanted to know how to make websites interactive to keep people there longer. So I started learning PHP coding because it appeared to be easier to learn than the Assembly Language I tried learning, or some of the others like fortran, perl, and I never did understand the flash coding.

That started a career as a PHP coder which lead into database design and management. After several years of that, technology was evolving faster than I could learn it. So I found others who were younger and had more experience, to do more of the programming. Of course dividing my time between that and learning marketing did not help either.

Once the programming was mostly lifted from me, I wanted to know even more about marketing online. Making the transition from programmer to marketer has not been easy. There are WAY many areas to research and learn in marketing than there are in programming.

However, in 2002 I made the transition from a part-time home-based business to full time. I took some of the experiences in my offline jobs and use them daily online. What I do now is get the programming jobs in, instruct the programmers on what the clients want done, then go on with my daily learning and marketing online. Sure there is still the customer support, but that is usually minor stuff and handled quickly.

If you read this far, you must be a glutton for the punishment of boring stories. I read somewhere that we are supposed to make our introduction personal, so that is what I did. This is me. Deal with it. :-)

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