Origins
Alison has been building websites since the late 90’s– ever since her family had dial-up Internet installed, she’s been very involved with making the web a more useful, more accessible place. By the mid-2000’s she was focused on honing her design and technical craft and building a freelance web business.
In early 2009, she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Mass Communications with a concentration in Graphic Design from the International Academy of Design and Technology to pursue more creative aspects of building websites. Since college, Alison has been involved with the American Advertising Federation– even winning an Addy for her work in Web. She served as Ad 2 Tampa Bay’s Interactive Director for a couple of years, launching their web presence into the modern age.
The age of open-source and community
With a strong desire for growing the open-source and publishing community in Tampa, Alison co-founded a WordPress group in the bay area called Tampa Bay WordPress in the summer of 2009. Wanting to grow the community further, Alison lead the charge to launch the first WordCamp in Tampa– a web publishing and technology conference revolving around the open-source publishing platform WordPress. The first event was held in October 2014 and has now grown to an almost 500 attendee, 3-day conference– with a special day dedicated to U.S. Veteran and Youth learning. Alison recruited 5 community leaders within the Tampa Bay WordPress organization to help coordinate. Her community leaders were kind enough to present her an Award of Leadership at the closing ceremony of WordCamp Tampa 2015.
Branching out on her own
Finally, after gaining a lot of experience in software development firms, advertising agencies, and small interactive firms throughout the years, Alison co-founded a design and development agency in early 2012. Her web design and development firm positioned its clients to utilize the inbound marketing methodology to grow their business. Throughout the years, Alison’s team launched dozens of websites and applications and a couple of custom WordPress plugins.
Public service
In 2017, Alison began winding down her firm’s work load after pursuing different opportunities. After much thought, she decided to run for office, Florida State House Representative, after her representative spontaneously decided to step down, spawning a special election in February 2018. Alison lost her bid for office.
With her passion for public service still burning brightly, in late 2018 Alison accepted a contractual position with the City of Memphis in Tennessee to overhaul their public-facing websites, including the primary city website and more than a dozen subdomains.
Currently, Alison is employed with a company that contracts with multiple local municipalities and public organizations to help them communicate more effectively with their constituents.
Alison is a member of Rotary International, the American Advertising Federation and the WordPress.org Community Team. Alison has also spoken at events and conferences on topics ranging from productivity while remote working to front-end design and development for WordPress.