The story of how I joined the women in tech movement starts pretty far from where you would expect. In first grade in Miami, Florida. (haha) My mom was surprised when she started receiving phone calls from the other mothers in my class. Their daughters had received handwritten invitations to a Japanese Tea theme party where they were expected to dress up.
The mothers wanted to know if the party was real, especially since it was nowhere near my birthday. Long story short, three days later my mother and I threw together a Japanese-themed tea party. It was complete with seating on the ground, tea and snacks for 10 six year old girls in long dresses.
Dream Jobs
In college, I became the Social Chairman of my sorority. It was therefore a natural progression that I began my career as an event planner. Moving from Miami to Los Angeles, I worked with companies such as FOX, 20th Century Fox, LA Weekly and several of the music venues in Hollywood. As time went on, my skills grew beyond events to marketing and eventually digital marketing.
Working for LA Weekly I was among the first people ever to use social media to reach the public from a business standpoint. While another company had fired me for being on MySpace, then considered the root of all evil by the mainstream, LA Weekly was forward-thinking and embraced my idea.
My early MySpace obsession proved more than good for business. It sparked a major interest in all things digital for me. So much so that eventually I went back to school, attending a 2 year web design program at UCLA.
Since graduating, I have worked for some pretty large companies in LA and London. Among them Joico, Sainsburys, Which?, FUSEMEDIA, and Molton Brown. I even returned to 20th Century Fox as a web developer. Interestingly, I still use my marketing skills when creating websites.
Doing it My Way
In 2016 I founded a digital agency called Phoenix Road Creative. I work with business owners and marketing teams to build websites that, once completed, can be updated quickly and easily. Quite often I team up with digital companies that focus more on marketing, SEO and social content to build websites for their clients. This allows those companies to maintain their relationship with these clients.
My primary focus is to build beautiful websites with a clean design that allow for site speed and easy SEO capabilities. I also give my clients autonomy to create a new landing pages or product pages as easily as they would post to a social networking site. This is done by incorporating WordPress, the world’s most popular content management system, into every website I build. I custom write the WordPress themes that I use specifically based on the needs of each of my clients. Once the theme is built, I provide a library of custom built content blocks that can be used to to add or change content anytime after the site has been launched.
Giving You the Power
Because all Phoenix Road Creative websites are bespoke, my team only uses the code you will need to achieve your goals. That means your site is guaranteed to run fast; getting your audience where they need to go, fast. SEO is built right into the foundation of every page. We provide the SEO tools you need to continue your journey to the first page of Google search results. We also provide training on how to use your content blocks and SEO tools. This comes in the form of a live one on one video tutorial as well as a series of articles that can be found in the tech tips section of our website.
Join the Women in Tech
It is important for me to share this story because for so many years I was one of very few women in tech. I never felt intimidated by this and in fact found even more support among my peers than ever in marketing.
I am always telling female students to seriously consider going into tech. As a creative person myself, I can tell you designing websites is definitely a creative job. The money can be great and there will always be work. Always. Technology is only growing from here. Want to know more? Get in touch!
