About Anguilla-Beaches.Com

The Story

I was 14 years old.

The Net was for MSN Messenger and research for school projects, only.

Never did I think I would start a website about a speck of an island in the Caribbean, an exotic part of the world I had yet to visit!

But then, the unimaginable happened...

My Dad loves those inspirational, quit-your-day-job-and-head-south stories. So, when he stumbled across the Blanchard's book A Trip to the Beach it was the main topic of conversation during many dinners, drinks, and cigars.

He happened to be chatting with his friend Mr. Burdon one afternoon, talking about the Blanchards and their move to a spot called "Anguilla" or "Angola"?, he had never heard of it, that was for sure! But Mr. Burdon had. In fact, he had just closed on a long-term lease on a villa on Barnes Bay.

With a warm heart, he invited us to stay for a week in March. Five months later we returned for six weeks. We had fallen in love.

Cove Bay, August 2002

A month and a half of tanning, swimming, eating, and watching Nickelodeon, was any kid's dream, but I did grow a little restless. (Hard to believe, I know!) My Dad brought all of his work with him (one computer!) and my curiosity grew.

He is the founder of SiteSell.Com, an Internet company that creates software that enables anyone and everyone to make successful websites. I thought, how about a website about Anguilla? After all, we did have quite a collection of stories and photos, being there for over a month.

The rest? It's history!

Anguilla-Beaches.Com Today

For six and a half years the website grew with only a couple of hours of input per week. Anguilla-Beaches.Com has mainly been a hobby site, my focus being school. December 2008 however, I started ironing out all of the kinks, taking the site a little more "seriously".

My Mom, Dad and sister permanently moved to the island in August 2008, waiting for the completion of our home. With kind consideration, they left me in our cool Canadian hometown, Montreal until Christmas. Alone in the cold, I finished up the university courses I needed to transfer out of my Communication Studies major at Concordia University to a business major at a school in New York City in Fall 2009.

What a great segue! Before jumping into management and finance, I would learn more about the inner-workings of the website I started when I was 14 years old. All the while taking business cues from my Dad.

And, that's where I am right now!

Scrub Island, March 2009

Typing from our home in the Caribbean, looking out at St. Martin, trying to find the balance between staying in and working on Anguilla-Beaches.Com, and going out and getting into adventures with the warm, kind, inviting people I have met.

Luckily here, work is also play. ;-)