My name is Nichole Hardesty and I graduated with my Bachelor’s Degree in Web Design and Development and a 4.0 GPA. I am aspiring to be a UI/UX Designer or a Web Designer. When I first started my college journey right out of high school, I did not know what I wanted to do for a career. I completed an Associate’s Degree in General Studies at Pima Community College, located in Tucson, Arizona, back in 2014. I got married to my husband who was in the Navy and moved to San Diego, California. A few years later, I started learning about HTML and CSS through free websites like W3Schools and I ended up liking it. It wasn’t until January 2019 when I decided to pursue my degree in Web Design and Development. May 2020 I received my Associate’s Degree in Web Design and Development from Southwestern College, located in Chula Vista, California. Then in August 2020, I started my Bachelor’s Degree at Champlain College and graduated August 2022. I had a few bumps on the road, but I am excited to start my career as a Web Designer.

The next hurdle after getting the Bachelor’s degree is to get real life experience. During my time at Southwestern College, as part of my degree, I got an internship for three months at a small marketing firm that uses WordPress to create websites for small businesses. We used Elementor Pro to create eCommerce sites and WPBakery for information sites like doctor offices. We created templates to have a more customized site that you cannot do with just WordPress alone. This internship gave me experience using WordPress and let me use my creativity to bring a website to life. I also utilized Photoshop to edit images for the sites to make them more appealing and uniformed. 

During my time at Champlain College, I took a class that taught me what UI/UX is and utilized Figma to create wireframes and prototypes for my projects, which is when I really decided what specialty I want to pursue. Not only can I use my creativity to create a wireframe that will eventually turn into a website, and prototype the wireframe to act as if it is a real website, but I can also test my prototype on others to get feedback on what works and what doesn’t. User experience is one of the most important aspect of creating a website or product. If the user cannot understand how to use the product, then the product is useless. On my own time, I used Figma to create another prototype of an app I envisioned that could prove useful to the correct audience. While working on my project, I learned way more about Figma and the potential it has.