Over the years I have written several posts about myself. I have pulled them together here, so anyone who wants to know who I am and where I have worked can read it in one place.
Working for myself since the late 90s
I ran Inspirational Guidance as a life coach and motivational speaker in schools, where I mentored teenage girls on their self esteem. A back accident that took 18 months to heal meant I needed another way to work, and that is how I found the internet. I set up my own WordPress website, other professionals asked me to build theirs, and that became my first online business.
I came online with a job mindset and sold my time for money. I did not focus on recurring income until late in the game. I started as an affiliate marketer before moving into WordPress development and online marketing, and I am proud to call myself a GenX digital pioneer.
My working timeline
- 2007 to 2010: I founded Women Internet Marketers, which brought together women from the USA, the UK and other countries, and ran a podcast before podcasting was mainstream.
- 2009: I created Dominican Diaspora, a membership site that grew to over 8,000 members and was eventually sold.
- 2011 to 2012: I was membership manager for Blog Success.
- 2011 to 2015: I launched Influencers.biz, a WordPress multisite platform that helped local businesses with collective blogging and SEO, long before "influencer" became a buzzword.
- 2011 to 2017: I ran Little Fish Digital Media, helping local business owners with SEO and getting clients.
- 2014: I completed a Professional Diploma in Digital Marketing.
- 2017 to 2020: I sold my business, took a break and worked part-time in admin and healthcare.
- 2020: I slowly returned to helping people with online marketing and started low content publishing on Amazon.
- 2023 to 2024: I trained as a full stack software developer in my 50s, with a focus on eCommerce.
- 2024: I built an eCommerce site and learning platform for an English teacher at streamenglish.co.uk and rebuilt Inspirational Guidance for myself.
- 2025: I built the eCommerce Builder that became Djangify, which lets me set up shops and sell digital downloads.
- 2026: I am building sites on Djangify, building traffic to Djangify shops and Inspirational Guidance, and creating AI video content.
The Little Fish years
Little Fish Media Company got its name from a belief I still hold: you might be a small fish, but online everyone is equal. I helped small and local business owners with SEO and WordPress websites. The business moved from littlefishmediacompany.com to littlefishdigitalmedia.com when "digital media" became the term of the day, and clients told me their number of new contacts grew week by week after their website went live.
By 2016 I had rebranded to digitallyconnected.co.uk, but it was a hard period. The recession had hit many of the small companies I worked with, my energy dropped and I sold the business when the chance came. The break gave me time to reflect. I missed the independence and creativity of running my own business, and I knew I wanted to come back with a clearer focus and better boundaries.
I came back older and wiser, knowing how much to take on and when to say no. I work on my own online ventures and help other people with theirs, from a one-off 3 hour tune-up to a long-term support package.
Before the algorithm (2013)
Around 2013 I wrote 101 Things to Know About Being an Introvert for Kindle, a practical guide to the communication gap between introverts and extroverts at work, and I contributed to the Flash Fiction Fridays short story podcast. Those early publishing and audio projects taught me how to structure content so it holds attention and builds an audience, and I still use that when I write code or design a digital product.
How I work: my Belbin profile
The Belbin Team Role model describes nine roles people tend to take in a team. My top three are Specialist, Implementer and Completer Finisher. In practice that means I bring focused expertise, I turn plans into reliable action and I check the details until the work is right. The matching weaknesses are that I can dwell on technicalities, I can be slow to respond to new possibilities, and I can worry too much and find it hard to delegate. Knowing this helps me give clients more targeted value.
Taking a break (August 2024)
In August 2024 I came back from time off and had to get back into coding, because it is easy to forget everything when you stay away. I put up and took down a few Wagtail sites and left Wagtail alone after an error I could not fix. That is the hard part of coding alone: nobody to ask. I started a new blog on wordpress.com for my paperback notebooks, which bring in a small monthly income and give me an easy place to write and create. I also thought about building something personal development related on inspirationalguidance.com, a domain that would turn 21 in 2025, and looked at buying a business on Flippa. I decided against a directory that meant finding and managing business owners, because I have done that before. I prefer a business that sells to consumers.
Rebuilding the foundations (late 2025)
In late 2025 I spent six weeks rebuilding how I deploy and run my software. I moved away from Hestia Control Panel because Apache and Nginx layered together, unclear ports and settings scattered across screens made problems hard to trace. Caddy gave me a simpler way to think: a site is a domain, a domain points to a port, Caddy handles TLS and Gunicorn serves Django. Each project now has its own service, its own port and a short Caddy configuration.
I also started treating my eCommerce builder as something that provisions environments, not something I deploy by hand. I finished Adminita, my Django admin theme, and put my bookkeeping software and invoice generator on GitHub. The theme running through all of it is ownership: owning my deployments, my infrastructure decisions and the long-term results of shortcuts. New projects no longer feel heavy, because I know where things live and how to debug them.
