Lee Hodson is the founder of JournalXtra and co-founder of digital media and web development company VizRED. He is a British web developer who specializes in WordPress and Magento site development.
Lee’s love affair with IT began as a toddler in the 1970s when his dad brought home a games console for the family. A simple console with 2 games built into it that got his dad into a lot of trouble with Lee’s mum because she thought it a waste of money. One of the games it played was Pong and the other is long forgotten in the annals of Lee’s mind.
Throughout the 1980′s, Lee played with 8-bit computers like the Atari 800XL, Amstrad CPC464, ZX Spectrum +2 and Tatung Einstein. He learned to program in BASIC through these computers and would later reminisce them with fun-packed days and nights playing classic games Donkey Kong, Miner 49er, Jet Set Willy, Manic Miner and hundred’s of other titles of his childhood.
Lee’s vocational endeavors took as many twists and turns as a roller coaster before he eventually returned to his first love of technology and IT.
After college, Lee worked in IT support, office administration, flight planning, cargo loading, SATS test marking, staff supervising, class auditing, sales, bar keeping and lots of other lines of work.
Lee’s first real venture into web development began in the Netherlands in 2005/2006 when he built a website to support his travel booking services for the British ex-pats he worked alongside at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam.
After returning to the UK from several years in the Netherlands, Lee chose to put his technical skills to good use and make a living with them. He registered his business name of Hodson Holdings, learned HTML and PHP then began building websites for a living.
After trying Joomla, SMF and self-written dynamic PHP based sites, Lee discovered the magic of WordPress and invested his time in WordPress development. Lee has been creating with WordPress since early 2008 and has several WordPress plugins hosted in the WordPress repositories.
Lee’s career in web development took off when he met Blanca Stella Mejia, the woman whom became his business partner with the founding of VizRED.
Lee and Blanca met through JournalXtra shortly after he wrote a guide to activating WordPress multisite when WordPress 3.0 was first released. That was in 2010. They soon realized they shared different skill sets and could work well together by pooling resources so teamed up to build websites, offer SEO services and support one and other in business.