Hi there! I’m Pamela Ueckerman, website extraordinaire, writer, dancer and mother of two boys. I’m a Virgo, I love to paint in watercolour and I have over twenty years’ experience working in Information Technology, specifically web development.
After completing a degree in Computer Science and an advanced certificate in Management Skills at RMIT, I went on to a professional career as a consultant. Over the next several years, I worked on projects for some of the largest corporations in Australia and The Netherlands as a programmer, technical lead, usability expert and front-end producer.
In 2006, I left the corporate world and launched Spiral Designs because I wanted more flexibility and a more personal experience, helping small businesses and entrepreneurs to reach their goals. I also wanted more time to pursue my other career of teaching dance.
I discovered WordPress early on and the amazing scope that it offered for content management. Back in those days though, I had to create my own little reusable library of code from scratch, for things like menus and breadcrumbs. I was also an early adopter of white-hat SEO strategies, which continue to be used today (as opposed to cheating search engines). In the intervening years, WordPress has improved by leaps and bounds and I no longer need to spend hours and hours untangling PHP and javascript to get those websites just right.
In 2010, while living in Amsterdam and with a baby in tow, I designed and built the website Amsterdam Mamas as a favour for a friend. The site – and its community – is now thriving as a not-for-profit expat service and still uses the original logo that I designed.
In 2012, back in Melbourne, my second child came along and decided that I needed to focus on my little family for a while so I put Spiral Designs on hold for a few years. In the meantime, I became a writer of children’s books, continued to teach dance and dabbled in website development and blogging.
These days, I enjoy checking out the latest WordPress plugins, hassling publishers to publish one of my children’s books, flitting around a ballet studio and running a private taxi service for my two precious boys.
xo