My name is Sibylle Weber and I am a budding web designer with a background in management and marketing.
After seven years on the commercial side of the online industry, I have now embarked on an MA in Web Design & Content Planning, which is due to finish in October 2013.
Twelve years in sales and marketing have shown me that providing customers with a great product experience is paramount to sustainable business success. It's more important than all the advertising, social and email marketing one could ever do.
Applied to websites, this means designing for the best possible user experience for everyone. This may mean that a website looks different across browsers but never broken. Its functionality and content will be accessible to everyone, irrespective of which browser or device they are using to access the site.
The look and feel of the site should not only mirror your brand's personality but should also make your website a truly enjoyable place to visit.
Email me at sib.weber@gmail.com, call me on +44 7446 518823 or get in touch via Twitter or LinkedIn.
Sports and Geography were the only subjects I was any good at in school, and the love for both has remained. I love being out in the wild, preferably hiking, cycling or engaging in some other form of outdoor sport.
I enjoy hill walking, mountain biking, kayaking, windsurfing, downhill skiing, snowboarding, sailing, swimming, athletics, archery and horseback riding, although I am by no means an expert in all of these activities. Once I did a tandem skydive but that was more to combat my fear of heights than anything else—I don't think I would want that as a regular hobby.
Unfortunately, I only manage to engage in most of these when I'm on holiday, but I do try and go for a run or walk every other day and I just bought a retro road bike, which I am planning to take for a spin around Virginia Water Lake and Windsor Great Park once I have installed new gear cables.
Especially dogs and horses. Between age 7–26, horses played a big role in my life and I even considered earning my livelyhood with a horse–related job. I had spent much of my youth working on a farm for youth riding holidays in southern Bavaria giving riding lessons, guiding hacks and looking after the kids. However, after working on a commercial stud for sports horses I rather lost my taste for the horseriding community, and when I went to work in the tourism industry I stopped riding horses even as a hobby. I would love to get back into riding some day but it's the sort of thing that you either do 100% or not at all.
I would love to have a dog at one point but right now my life isn't stable enough for one. I don't believe in leaving a dog alone at home all day, and as neither my partner nor I are at home during the day, this'll have to wait.
—This drawing is based on a photo by Brad Frost of his dog Ziggy.
Great photography (irrespective of whether moving or still image) has always been able to take my breath away, but I only really got into it when I lived with a guy who not only knew a lot about cameras and photography, but also had his own darkroom! I must have been about 19 at the time. I had just dropped out of school and I seriously considered becoming a photographer. Typically for an insecure 19–year–old though, I let myself be discouraged from people who were telling me I would have to shoot weddings and babies all the time and that I should not delude myself about becoming the next Ansel Adams or Natalie Fobes.
The same insecurity has kept me from practicing so that I am still not a very good photographer. I always felt weird going out there on my own with my camera shooting pictures in public—and obviously not taking snap shots but trying to do something more artistic. As if I were pretending to be something I'm not. I would have been mortified if somebody had asked to look at my pictures. I am starting to overcome this though and digital photography has made it so affordable to go out and shoot as many pictures as you like that I may yet have a chance ;)
Right. It seems we have finally arrived at the more serious topics like work and education. After school I had taken certificates in foreign languages (English and French) and business administration in tourism but skipped university. On my appointment into a management role in 2008 I thought it might be a good idea to learn what a manager is supposed to do and enrolled in a BSc Business Administration with the University of London International Programmes.
After about a year into my new position and the BSc I realised that what I was doing was taking me further and further away from hands–on web design work, and I eventually resigned my job and am currently taking an MA in Web Design & Content Planning at the University of Greenwich.
Apart from various jobs I held while still in education, I have spent all of my professional life since 1999 at Air Canada, starting as assistant to the then General Passenger Sales Manager in Germany, and then working my way up the ladder. I spent three years in outside sales where I gained valuable experience in dealing with (extremely demanding and sometimes unpleasant) clients, before I was assigned to the project to launch local website editions for various international markets.
I started out looking only after the German website, managing local content and promotions, as well as localisation of the generic site content. As I had some experience with HTML and an afinity for technology, I soon took on a coordinating role between the Web Team in Montreal and the local offices. This eventually evolved into a management position but became more and more marketing oriented so that I decided to leave the company at the end of 2011 to pursue a career in web design.
For more details about my employment history visit 