Skills

My experience building webpages goes back to 1999. I was in college and I wanted to have my own webpage, as it seemed like the thing to do. I started out with a free page on a site called Spree.

Before long, I expanded the personal things I had on the site to include the statistics of the baseball teams I was involved with, either playing or coaching. It was very popular with both the players and parents.

During the 2000-2001 school year, I served as the chair person of the Internal Affairs committee of the Student Association at SMSU. My committee was in charge of setting up and maintaining our organization webpage. I used it to share our meeting minutes and agendas, as well as other information about student government. My work earned the Student Association an award for best Club & Organization website in the spring of 2001. I maintained the webpage through the 2001-2002 school year, the remainder of my time in the Student Association.

Spree decided to stop hosting free websites and I took some time off from baseball so the personal web stuff fell to the wayside for awhile.

During my last year of college and before I started my career as a teacher, I worked at Computers and Beyond. There, I was able to expand my web knowledge when I was given the task of working on an e-commerce website run by the business.

In 2003, with a wedding on the calendar, I decided it would be a good time to get the site going again and I moved things over to Yahoo's Geocities. I also started a blog on Xanga in May of 2003.

I started my teaching career at Holy Redeemer School in the fall of 2003. One of the things offered at HRS is the opportunity for students to sign-up for elective classes which are held for an hour on Fridays. One of the classes I chose to teach was "Build Your Own Webpage". I had the students work with Mozilla Composer and a free webspace at Geocities.

During the summer, I teach several classes for the Summer Talents Academy. One of the most popular classes has been "Build Your Own Webpage". I have shared my web knowledge with many students over the past three summers. In 2006, I changed from Mozilla Composer to SeaMonkey, both of which have their roots in Netscape Composer, which I used to create my first website.

I was approached to do a website for a new business that was getting started in the beginning of 2006. This renewed my interest in creating webpages and I expanded my skill set to go far beyond the Composer and Frontpage things I had done in the past.

I maintained the personal Geocities site up until the spring of 2006. Then I finally took a leap to get my very own dot-com website. The work I did on the Living Connected site really inspired me to finally move beyond the free Geocities site I had used for over three years. The birth of my son, Brady, provided an event that I felt deserved coverage on the Internet and so, thebpark.com began.

My current web host provides two domain names with my hosting package. The other domain I chose was mrbrandl.com. I use this website for all things dealing with my educational career.

I am constantly learning new things and ways of doing things on the web. My favorite part of creating websites is the new things I learn how to do, as each project is a little bit different. Please let me know how I can use my knowledge to help you put together a website!

MB