Some call her the UK’s first lady of technology. She’s also CEO and co-founder of Moonfruit, the trading name of DIY website construction tool SiteMaker, which helps those with limited knowledge to create professional-looking websites. Some 3.6m such sites have been created using Moonfruit’s software since it launched in 2000. But as Wendy Tan-White explains to Mark Williams, sometimes you’ve got to fail to succeed

Perhaps it was inevitable that Wendy Tan-White would end up working in IT. Born in Salford in 1970, her family moved to Cumbernauld in Scotland with her dad’s job when she was two. “Few people worked with computers then, dad was ahead of his time. We moved to Reading when I was nine, dad got a job with Racal, which became Vodafone. Mum did a degree and ended up working in IT, too.”

At grammar school the teachers filled pupils with self-belief, Wendy recalls. After A-levels, she did a degree in computer science at Imperial College in London. “I went from an all-girl school to a course where only seven out of 120 students were female. I was living in halls in South Kensington, it was all very new and exciting. At Imperial we were using state-of-the-art equipment ― and the internet ― it was only 1989.”

To read more of this article click here: