Soulscape Web Design is owned and operated by Debra Rae-Smith, a 30-something year old female living on the Central Coast of NSW with three children of the feline variety, and a husband who is all too human*

I started my working life as an Environmental Officer in government, after a 4 year stint studying Environmental Science at the University of Wollongong. My addiction with the internet began back in 1997, when I bravely volunteered to learn HTML and report on environmental news for my employer’s website. Hand-coding the web reports did nothing to endear me to the exciting world of web page development – but learning to create graphics for the web did.

After taking a course in Adobe Photoshop, I fell in love with the program – and discovered I wasn’t the artistically-challenged, creatively-deficient government pleb I considered myself to be! I found that I could actually create “art” – truly awful though my early efforts were! Inspired by my new-found creativity, I started a personal website offering free web “layouts” to the web community.

Soulkarma.com lasted four years, and grew to have over 70 layouts.  But it soon came time that my personal website and my employer’s environment news page wasn’t enough of a “fix”, and I decided to take the plunge into web design professionally…

In 2001, I landed the Web Producer position at HarperCollins Publishers. I was responsible for maintaining the publisher’s sci-fi genre site, Voyager Online, and developing new sites for their A-class authors – a dream job for a sci-fi buff with a passion for building shiny new websites! Unfortunately it didn’t last – after just 15 months, a new CEO shattered the dream, closing the Internet & Multimedia Department, and sending my colleagues and I to the unemployment line.

Unemployed at a time when jobs in the web industry weren’t exactly growing on trees – what was a girl to do? Start her own business, of course! Soulscape Web Design was born, and I discovered the joys and agonies of self-employment (going to work in your pjs = joy; preparing your taxes = absolute agony!). After seven years as a freelance web designer, I still love the web, still love Photoshop, and still hate tax time!

* but I wouldn’t have him any other way!