Biographical Sketch
I was raised in East Tennessee, in Lenoir City. I graduated from LCHS in 1990, and spent my college years in Cookeville. In college, I was involved with Campus Crusade for Christ, and I went to Costa Rica as a student missionary from May 1994-July 1995. In 1996, I earned a B.S. in English/Journalism from Tennessee Technological University. I moved to the Nashville area in March 1997.
From 1997-1999, I worked as a computer instructor for New Horizons Computer Learning Center. I began by teaching beginning MS Office classes, but by the time I left, I had taught every office suite at every level on every platform, and had re-invented their desktop publishing and Photoshop classes. To this day, if you take the scanning class at New Horizons Nashville, you’ll be looking at a picture of me milking a cow.
In 1999 I became interested in web design. For my assignment for a church history class, I made my first real web site. It’s been redone a couple of times since then, but it’s still up at www.churchtimeline.com. It was also during this time that I learned JavaScript and Flash, and picked up my second-oldest gig, www.katybowser.com.
In January 2000, I began working for The Renaissance Center (www.rcenter.org) in Dickson, as their full-time web designer. I quickly picked up “classic” ASP 3.0 (it wasn’t “classic” back then!) and began to consider myself a programmer. I wrote a message board program, and redesigned the center’s web site as a manageable database-driven web application. Over my years there, I became more and more involved with programming and database development, on top of my design work.
On January 3, 2004 I married a sweet, charming, beautiful Dickson girl named Robyn. I met her at The Renaissance Center, where she had spent a year acting with the Renaissance Repertory Company.
In May 2006, I founded Clay McKinney Web Development. The Renaissance Center remains my largest client, and I very much enjoy working out there a day or two every week. The rest of the time, I’m doing what I love doing – helping businesses market themselves on the web.