Heather has been coding webpages since 1995, and attributes much of the success of her henna business to her ability to create and successfully manage websites. She was a member of her high school’s Web Club back when it was rare to have a computer in one’s home, let alone figure out how to connect to the internet (at 14.4k dialup speeds!) and share content there. In that period, she had the best-loved ska-punk website on the ‘net (at least as far as Jeeves and Altavista were concerned) – a pre-Napster wonder in aggregating music uploaded by other users – a Geocities site at /SunsetStrip/. Creating websites has long been just the right combination of problem solving, creative thinking, and design to make her nerdy heart very happy.

She has always been the person tagged in any workplace she has been a part of to manage (and often rebuild) the websites of large organizations. From GreenCorps to various offices at Boston University and UMass Boston, many nonprofit organizations entrusted their web presence to Heather throughout her tenure with them in college and grad school.

The unexpected but now quite long-term success of Henna by Heather, which started as tiny side project in a super-niche market when she was in college, is largely built upon its website and overall internet presence. By being a lifelong student in what she jokingly refers to as “internet domination”, she has been blessed to be able to make a living creating art. Realizing what a blessing this is, she wanted to spread the love, and teach as many of her other fellow artists and small business people how to create their own success in an increasingly digital world.

Heather has helped everyone from her fellow henna artists, to the owner of the world’s first vegan ice cream truck, to hula dancers, reiki practitioners, clothing and coffee shop owners, educators, musicians, and construction industry workers take the future of their business into their own hands by helping them update, create, or radically revamp their web presence.

Helping others build their own success is important for her. Having seen so many of her friends and colleagues at the mercy of their web designers, who would often either disappear or demand tons of cash just to do the simplest and most basic of things, she has been on a personal mission to help people understand their websites enough that they are able to develop and maintain them on their own. By utilizing all the teaching skills she developed in that decade or so when she thought she’d grow up to be an educator, Heather meets clients where they are, builds a solution that will work for them, and teaches them how to utilize it to its full potential.

All this said, Heather’s practice of doing this has always been an ad-hoc thing, done on-demand as needed for whatever situation might arise among her circle of friends, artist colleagues, fellow local small business people, etc. But, with recent developments having shown she is quite capable of taking on larger projects (more about that later), she is thinking she would like to do this on a more regular basis, and for a broader client base.

Writing out this little history of how it all came about and what it is she really does for people is the first step towards making that happen.

Watch this space. A more involved story may just develop here.
Most notably, there will be screenshots of client work, as well as narratives of what was done and why… because this is the kind of thing that she has learned people who do not just trust her implicitly would like to see.