Personal: My first website

Tags: design, personal

Hello my lovelies,

Sorry for the quietness here on the blog, I have been really busy lately and haven’t had a chance to take outfit photos. So hey, what could be a better chance to do another more personal post?

There is an on-going competition at 123-reg.co.uk about websites, about your FIRST website in particular, and you can win a MacBook Pro! (See more information on the competition and how to enter HERE.) I’m sure some of you know that I’m working as a digital artworker/designer in my daily life, but with this post I can tell you a bit more about my past, especially when it comes to design.

I guess technically the first website I made was back in high school in 1997 (yes I am THAT old) with ugly bright colours and bad HTML.. but I don’t really count that as my first website, haha ;). So, in 2001 I was 23, studying multimedia and started getting more into HTML and design. I was also a huge BSB fan, so quite obviously my first website was inspired by them. I wanted to do a fansite, but I knew I’d never have the time and patience to update all the news and images etc, that is really hard work, and it is time-consuming to keep up with everything like that. So I wanted my first site to be a domain where I could host little fansites and cliques under my domain name.

The name of my domain was haunted-heart.net, and the name came from a song of the same name by Willa Ford, Nick Carter’s ex-girlfriend (yes, a bit creepy, I know). I felt that the name fit me.. my heart has always been haunted in some ways, never been lucky in love etc. Yes, it would still fit actually. I ended up having the domain for almost 10 years. First 4-5 years I hosted other people’s sites, and for the latter time it was my personal blog. See, I was a blogger before it became cool ;).

I designed the website’s graphics with Adobe Photoshop, which today is my main tool at work. I worked on the code with the help of Adobe Dreamweaver (back then it was called Macromedia Dreamweaver), searching Altavista (time before Google, hey) for codes, and also with some help from more code-savvy friends. Part of me is sad that I don’t have any images of my layouts to show you, but another part is happy, since they would make me seriously cringe. I knew nothing about design ‘rules’, I used way too crazy fonts, too many ‘artistic’ brushes and textures. Yeah, the professional design-person that I am now would NEVER use that kind of design. I am proud of the site though, and especially the coding parts. I have forgotten most of what I could do then, and that is a shame. Although my site was only optimized for Internet Explorer (MEGA cringe!!!), so codes like that wouldn’t even work in today’s browsers, haha.

If you are thinking of a career in digital design, or interested in seeing what I do today, please message me and I’m happy to answer any questions and/or share my portfolio with you.

*This is an example post to be used for marketing the competition and is not an actual entry*