About Karen McCullough...

After fifteen years as a computer programmer, including a stint as head developer for an early bar-coded inventory management system, Karen McCullough realized she was burnt out on COBOL and BASIC when she started dreaming lines of code. She made a career change and became a writer and editor, eventually working for a trade publishing company as associate editor and managing editor. In the mid-1990s, that company decided it was time to venture out onto the Internet. Because of her technical background, they asked her to spearhead the effort to develop web sites for all their publications.

At that time, she knew nothing about how to build web sites, though she had already visited many of them in this exciting new information universe. In fact, Karen has been online since the late 1980s, being an early member of the Prodigy service. Of course, back then a 2400-baud modem was considered screamingly fast and each page took over two minutes to load. It somewhat limited the enjoyment, but she still got a sense from it of the possibilities. She hung around various bulletin boards, delighting in the discovery that it could connect you with people having shared interests all over the world.

Undaunted by her lack of knowledge of web development, she got a book that promised to teach you HTML in 24 hours and then picked the brains of everyone she knew who had experience on the web. Several months later, she had set up basic sites for all of the company's magazines. Over the next year, she continued to refine them, adding content and new functions. She soon realized she'd need more than HTML to make happen everything she wanted the sites to do. Fortunately, she also soon discovered that her background in BASIC programming made ASP looked like an old friend.

Not long after that a much larger trade publishing company lured her away to set up sites for its magazines. She spent the next five years, developing the company's one existing basic site into a group of half a dozen sites that served up daily news to their industries and drew a total of over a million visitors a year.

At the same time she began designing sites for a few fellow authors and realized she enjoyed working on her own far more than she liked working for an enormous multi-national publishing company with its enormous corporate bureaucracy.

In 2005, she retired from the corporate world to live her dream of working independently. She is now semi-retired and taking on only a limited number of new jobs.

If you're interested in discussing having her do a project for you, feel free to contact her here.