My Background

“Make a living out of doing what you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

Vital Stats

For a little over 12 years now I’ve been gaining tons of commercial- and agency design experience in South Africa, the USA and England designing and producing websites, with a particular interest in website usability. My skills include the usual — Photoshop, Macromedia Flash & Studio MX, meticulous (X)HTML and CSS hand-coding, AAA Accessible design- and code. I have a passion for making sites accessible to search engines and people with disabilities and am a real nerd about adhering to the strictest web standards. I have designed and produced front-ends for a number of content management systems and the sites they in turn produce, and have the front-end ASP and PHP skills needed to achieve the full visual range needed for a gorgeous website.

Bleh bleh bleh…

My name is Olivia – I’m a wanderlusting South African originally from Cape Town I have always followed my nose towards things that makes my heart beat. I am a US Resident now after travelling the US for the past few years. I love exploring this beautiful country!

As an established freelance web designer with over 12 years experience, I make a small living on the go, via my heavy old laptop, data card or WiFi, as and when I need the money to travel. I’m happy with just enough money to get by reasonably comfortably and explore. So for some places I live in I can get by comfortably on $800 a month and other places I’d spend triple that, but then I’d have less time for exploration while I work to earn that. My schedule is worked out depending on how many projects I have running at a time, and how much I need to get by in the places I’m living.

I can be spotted moving to and from some of my favourite homebases – Austin TX, Pittsburgh PA, Nederland CO, Bisbee AZ, Marathon TX, Portland OR and Ometepe Island, Nicaragua. I like to stay in places for at least long enough to get involved at a local level, to really get the full flavour of the unique culture, hideouts and get to know some of the wonderful local characters. I’ve found working from coffee shops is a great way to meet some really interesting people pretty quickly in a new town, though I did have to learn how to come out of my shell a lot over the past few years and be the first one to say “hi”. At first it was dauntingly hard but now moving to a new town and starting over gets easier the more I do it. In fact its become a bit of a thrill! The secret to this of course is to pack lighter and lighter each time. Moving with a ton of furniture is never, ever, a good time.