Welcome all to the fresh and updated Knowles Family website!

Richard and I picked up this domain back on August 3, 1998, just four short months after we got married and the family website was born soon after. Back then, my knowledge of web sites was limited to very simple HTML code and using Microsoft FrontPage /shudder. Over the years I would try to keep the site updated, but since the birth of Jonathan, it had fallen into shambles.

I was told in August 2006 that I would be out of a job in October of that year after Nokia made the decision to stop manufacturing CDMA phones themselves and switched the plant to GSM/UMTS and ODM CDMA. Half of their workforce was released and I found myself trying to figure out what to do.

My thoughts drifted back to website design and I decided that I would like to take a class in Dreamweaver. After poking around Adobe’s website, I discovered that one of the local community colleges (Palomar) taught quite a few classes that sounded interesting to me. I applied to the college and then settled on three different classes that started in just a week. I took a class from the CSIS department in Advanced Web Site Development and two classes from the Graphics Communications department: Web Page Layout I (using Dreamweaver) and Designing for Web Standards II.

All I can say is “WOW”! I had so much fun in the Web Standards class (and the other ones too, just not as much fun). I discovered that my passion lies in web development and I haven’t looked back since. I’ve taken classes in Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Fireworks. I’ve taken classes in JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, Perl/CGI and Java. The amazing thing is that I’m still not done. I keep finding more classes to take and I just recently finished classes in Flash, Perl/CGI, ASP.NET and Ajax. I’ll finish out this year with classes in C#, Adobe Acrobat for the web and a couple of classes in Java.

To top it off, I’m back at Nokia full time since April 2008! I wish I could say I was doing mobile web development for them, but alas, I’m not. I still hold out hope that maybe one day I can move into that field somehow. One can always dream…

Anyway, please look around the website and let me know what you think. If something doesn’t work, please be sure to not only tell me what isn’t working (or looks funny) and what browser/version you are using.

Ciao!