Heather Hopkins

Growing up, I had trouble reconciling my girly impulses with my tomboy pursuits. I spent hours hosting elaborate tea parties for my stuffed animals. I also enjoyed sitting outside, covered in mud, dismantling my father's latest gadget to 'see how it worked.' These two things, a desire to make things pretty and an obsession with technology, naturally drew me to computers and the internet. I made my first website in 1994 for my eighth grade technology project.

In college, I was frustrated that I could find no programs offering both web design and coding. My academic advisor explained that no one did both - you either made pretty designs or you wrote the code. Design without coding, and vice versa, was incredibly boring. Disheartened, I majored in Psychology and kept website development as a hobby. In 2001, a company asked if they could advertise on one of my many fansites. Until this point, I truly didn't think you could make money online. That first advertising check turned my hobby into a career.

For more than ten years, I have been working with clients to define effective web strategies, create intuitive user experiences, design elegant interfaces, market the sites I help create, and then measure, analyze, and improve performance.