Starting out as a graphic design student in 2004 and wanting to get in video game development, I actually ended up finding a niche in budding web design projects after graduating from a 2 year associates program. At the time, no one was really designing websites so much as they were programming them, so I really made an effort to pour a lot of design into my website builds, which I was building from scratch with what little web development skills I had picked up in school. In the mid to late aughts, barely any companies were looking to hire designers specializing in web, so the only thing left to do was to start my own company with a couple of friends, whereupon I was introduced to WordPress development as a CMS platform for regular websites. During this time, I taught myself proper web development technique utilizing common languages such as HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP.