My name is Kevin John Banks, I was born in Durban on the 18 June 1972. (See it is my birthright to support the Sharks.) I matriculated in 1990 from Jeppe Boys high school in Kensington Johannesburg achieving full colors in swimming and a matric exemption. At that stage I was unsure of what I wanted to study or in what direction I wanted to move in so I did what many SA guys at the time did, National Service. I was lucky enough to be accepted into the Navy and in 1991 spent a year on the South Africa coast line courtesy of the South Africa Navy.

After finishing in the navy in December 1991 I was again unsure of what to do. Then a friend of mine and myself had a brainwave to go and travel abroad. For the next 5 months we saved up the money to leave SA on an extended vacation. Later in 1992 (may) we left the shores of South Africa for London. I spent a few months in London working construction in London. Month later it was time to move off with a friend to see Europe. After touring Europe for 2 months I found myself in Greece with very little money and no ticket out of there. I was lucky enough to find employment at the Hostel Aphrodite in Athens. This was to be my new home for a few months which turned into years.

On leaving Athens in Dec 94 I travelled to Cairo then Bangkok (second time) and on to Australia which was to become my new home for the next 14 Months. Early in 96 I returned home to deal with family issues. It was just over a year before it was time to head off again. In Feb 97 I left for Athens again where I moved up to manager and ran 2 hostels. This kept me extremely busy and was also where my love for computers and the internet started. Over the next 2 years I set up what I consider the 1^st internet café in Greece. This happened in the basement of the Student and Travellers inn in the Plaka district. Dec 97 I had a small trip to the states and Canada, this is my love for New York city started.

At the end of 98 I returned home for a vacation and decided to hang up my travelling boots. It was early in 99 when I started my life as a travel agent for a company then know as the Adventure Travel Club. The company went through its changes and was time to leave when it was USIT Adventures in May 2002.

During the year of 99 I met my lovely wife Claire. We have been inseparable ever since. 2002 was a huge year that saw Claire and I married as well as seeing the start of my new business called Awesome Travel. Awesome Travel Grew from strength to strength however out grew me and saw my departure in 2008. In 2008 I started a new venture called Travel 247 which has a brilliant online presence in the form www.travel247.co.za and has been going great guns since then.

My sons Skye and Kyle are my awesome sons born in 2005 and 2007. They are very different from each other which does not stop me enjoying every gifted minute that I spend with them. This spurred me to create the online community called www.babymania.co.za with a push from Amanda. Together we formed Awesome Web Development which effectively has been building since 2005.

My interest for Travel and what it has to offer have been the corner stone of my professional career in South Africa. I have grown from a receptionist to the owner of a successful Travel agency called Travel247. With having the right drive and dedication I have grown from strength to strength in the arena with a vast knowledge of the travel market and what it takes to service the clients right first time. This has culminated in me sharing what I have learned to advise travellers of the travel market via my blog www.travelblog.co.za.

My interest for computers and the internet started in 97 with the internet café in Athens. It was in the winter of 97 that I created my very first web site called Turtle world. This was done with Geocites which is now taken over by Yahoo. In 2002 I registered my first domain name www.awesometravel.co.za and www.charterflights.co.za both of which are still running today.

My first huge website came together in 2005 with www.webmania.co.za, the site has been running now for over 4 years and has over 13 000 members. From there I have pretty much snowballed on my IT interests to where I currently own over 500 domains and have over 80 active websites 3 hosting packages including 2 reseller packages and a dedicated server. Last month the sites ate over 120 gigs of bandwidth with the top site using 17 Gigs and seeing over 400 000 page impressions. I have google adsense running on the sites and starting to see revenue increasing at a steady pace. Details of the sites that I have up and running and what I have learned doing them can be seen on another blog of mine www.awd.co.za (Awesome Web Development). This is all run and owned under the auspicious of Awesome Web Development details of which can be seen here: www.awd.za.net.

In the past 2 years AWD (Awesome Web Development) has moved on to bigger projects and have managed and designed a charity website called www.isupport.co.za , the aim of the website is to assist charities with their fund raising efforts and to funnel money to them by collecting donations on their behalf via an internet payment gate way which we have set up. We have also created an employment website for Men on the side of the road with MSR which can be found on the domain www.workerhire.co.za. This website has over 10 000 workers on the database that are looking for employment. This has the end user in mind where people who are looking for casual help during the week or weekends and require specific skills for odd jobs from bricklaying to electricians, they can find them on the site. Feedback can be left for the work done which in turn will make the worker more employable.

Our latest project is www.ework.co.za where users can signup and create their CV online. The web forms have been done with the simplest of work flow and management to make it dead easy to create the CV. Once all the input is inserted the CV can be emailed or generated into word and downloaded. The site has been up for 2 weeks now and has passed the 500 online CV’s mark. We are working on phase 2 of the site where we would like to make the site beneficial for agencies to sign up and search the CV’s that are in the database thereby duplicating the uses of the site. People will have the option of hiding their CV’s in the case where they do not want agencies to find them.