Jason Stanbery - behind the music

If I was a character on CHiPs

If you've read everything from the home page and still desire to know more about me, then here you go.

I graduated near the top of my class from high school in 1996, which makes me, well you can do the math. I ventured off to college like many people did. I really didn't have a clue what I wanted to do, nor did I really even understand all the options I had at the time. After a couple of changes in major I became an economics major. Though this wasn't the path I ended up taking, during a business class I made my first web page. It was pretty horrendous, but the seed was planted.

I left college before I graduated and headed back to Decatur. Here I found myself working a job that was going to lead to nowhere. So I did what I thought was necessary to get out of central Illinois and joined the Marine Corps. I did 5 years on active duty, got to see places I would never have had the opportunity to see (Okinawa, Japan & the beautiful deserts of the middle east to name a couple). It was during this time I married one of my bestest friends, Melody. We moved to North Carolina. Here she made the transition from journalism to copywriting. It was also here that I got my hands on a copy of Adobe GoLive. Though not a whole lot grew from that copy of GoLive, it did fertilize that seed that was planted back in college.

When I got out of the Marines I started taking classes in the evenings while working in IT, setting up printers, fixing computers, etc. I kept learning HTML and got a few little freelance web gigs. Melody then took a job in Springfield, MO and we moved halfway across the country. Here I started working down in Branson (yikes) as a web designer for a land developer. After doing that for a year, surviving a massive lay-off, I found out about Sugar Design Studio in Springfield. I sent them some stuff, came in and talked to them for about an hour, and then three weeks later I found myself sitting at a computer in their studio. That was November of '07.

I have an Associates Degree in Computer Information Systems with an emphasis in Web Development. I'm less than a year away from my Bachelors. After all the learning I've done on my own school is pretty useless. Its hard for schools to keep their classes up to date due to the rapid rate of advances in the internet world. Many schools still teach table based layouts, revealing CSS in the most advanced courses. At this point though, I'd be a fool not to finish.