Over a decade ago, I learned HTML and set up my first website on a free hosting community called Geocities.  It was a fantasy setting I called Desert Realm, and since they only allowed HTML (and nothing fancy like PHP, ASP, etc), it was set up in a "choose-your-own-adverture" style, where you would read a paragraph or two and click a link to see the outcome of your decision.  Threes of traffic hit the site every day, and I was thrilled! 

But, I wanted more...

I wanted a community where people could interact with each other, and create their own storyline.  I created a community using Yahoo Clubs (now called Yahoo Groups), and that satified my needs for a while.  I was able to attract a group of people that wrote an interactive story of a friendly Orc and his friends on a quest to return a savage desert land to its former glory.

Yahoo Clubs had one major drawback, which was that it wasn't able to thread messages and thus it had to all be a part of the same storyline.  This bugged me because not every character was in the same place at the same time and things got confusing. 

About the same time, I started learning Microsoft's server-side scripting language ASP, and started writing a basic message board to solve my earlier dilema.  This was the message board that never was, and later in my career, I had to learn PHP for a project and was hooked.  PHP has many free open-source projects available, and I found a free PHP forum to host Desert Realm on.

I focused on promoting and keeping the Desert Realm forum alive for a few years with the help of some really great Admins and Moderators.  It was fairly popular and well known in the fantasy writing genre during its golden age, and I started to get the idea that I could make a living creating websites. 

I left Desert Realm in the capable hands of Rob and Pam, the site admins, and created a new community for Photographers and Artists.  Nature Photography is another of my passions.  Between word of mouth, natural links, and the big search engines, the photography community named The Lens Flare has grown to its current size, which now boasts about 500k visitors per year.

ProSpotlight.com is the culmination of the knowledge I've gained from programming and promoting The Lens Flare and Desert Realm, working at an online marketing company, studying other successful websites, and mixing and matching ideas with the other founders of the site.