My name is Kai Gittens and I’m a New York City-based web designer.

I worked in the music business for 15 years doing mostly sales with a little bit of marketing, working my way up from intern to low/middle management. Jive/Zomba (home of ‘N SYNC and Britney Spears) was the biggest record label I worked at but I found more satisfaction working at small independent labels with Caroline Distribution being my best experience.

I was fully prepared to remain in the music biz until I retired but in August 1998, the digital downloading of music files began to gain popularity. This was a few months before Napster hit its zeitgeist and although I certainly did not know that Napster was coming, I definitely knew that SOMETHING like Napster would come along eventually and that I would need a backup plan for my career.

At this time. the internet startup era brought on by the dot-com rush was still peaking and an ex-boss of mine had a real estate-based dot-com that he needed help with. I came in and did some very basic office tasks while learning about all thing related to web design and development. Flash (back when Macromedia still owned it) really excited me so I studied that with a vengeance. That led to my learning HTML, JavaScript and a few other things and eventually, I had enough knowledge to take on freelance web design projects while still working within the music business.

For the next seven years, my web design career became more and more abundant as the music business provided less and less job security. On the freelance end, I worked many small but fun projects along with a few high profile ones such as the United Nations and Trump Magazine. All of this made my resume look good and I eventually landed my current job as a web designer at Revlon Cosmetics, allowing me to leave the music business for good in 2005.

I’m now focusing on the more structured aspects of front-end web development, particularly HTML5, CSS3, AJAX, Silverlight and all of the fancy JavaScript libraries that all the cool kids are into right now. I’m also peeking at database development, but only peeking as I can only learn so much at a certain pace. And of course, I’m upping my WordPress development skills constantly and truly feel that I’m getting better and better with it everyday.

Also, in case you’re wondering, “Kai” rhymes with “why”. Kaidez means “kai-dez” as in “kai design.”