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For Marva Marrow, you could say that the creation of her educational pet website was partly the result of a trip to a cat show in San Diego, California. What she saw there was about 15,000 people who had plunked down $8 each to see the show. To her, that meant there was a lot of interest in pets.

But that was only one event that pushed her into designing and managing a site dedicated to animals. Marrow also had a way with design and a desire to use her artistic skills in this new interactive media. "I worked on an interactive project creating a digital art museum and got hooked on interactive media."

There were several things she liked about this new frontier, known as the World Wide Web. "I like the participatory nature. I like that I could combine all my personal skills of photography and writing and drama and everything else in an educational way. It was very new at that time to use that medium. And then the logical part of that was the immediacy of the online world, the interactivity," she says.

The year was 1994, and Marrow, with art and writing skills in hand, set out to explore the new "wide open, Wild West frontier." The rest was "baptism by fire," she says. That is, she had to learn as she traveled deeper into the unexplored, and sometimes with the clock ticking.

She originally ran the site out of her house and the design studio where she was an employee. "For the first couple years, it was totally unpaid and very full time."

Although it hasn't been easy street since then, merging her company with another did bring more staff and an e-commerce component. Marrow remains in control of content.

The biggest challenge came from the earlier days, Marrow says, when she had to survive with no income and with her parents asking, "When are you going to give up this dream?" She recommends perseverance to others if they want their dreams to see the light of day.

"I really am an artist, so I've never focused on making money, just working on something that I wanted to work on with passion," says Marrow. Breeding cats and her art background combined to get the site off the ground. "It came from my personal interest and fascination -- the way the technical world met the creative world and the possibilities that developed."

Amy Strycula was on maternity leave when she made the critical decision of creating a business online. She wanted to start something that would allow her more personal freedom and something to call her own. She decided that the Internet, specifically web design, was an opportunity for her to fuse her creative and technical skills.

She had a technical background, having spent 17 years as a computer programmer, systems manager and vice-president in the banking industry. "But I have always been a creative person at heart. I've always loved art, photography and music," she says.

She became creative director of a website that she began in 1995. The site features cool places to shop on the Internet as discovered and rated by staff. Her reason for starting a shopping portal: "I guess it was because I love to shop and it seemed like a good topic that I could be creative with, and it obviously had a lot of potential -- that was pre-e-commerce boom," Strycula explains.

One reward of being an online producer is seeing the fruits of her labor immediately. "With web design, you can see the impact of your results immediately. When I was a programmer in the banking field, there was a lot of red tape and things took too long," she says.

In addition, being in a fast-paced industry that is progressing every day is something she enjoys. "I think the evolution of the Internet itself is simply incredible, and I consider each day a learning experience," explains Strycula.

Using creative talent is also appealing for David Hainline. He is in charge of e-commerce operations and marketing as well as site content for an online bookseller.

He worked for the Canadian book merchandising company's bricks and mortars operation, but decided to dive into the online world. "I wanted to be a part of a new idea," he explains.

He already had the management and operations ability, which he carried over from previous positions. But the online world was a new challenge -- and he found it was full of rewards.

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