. Yes I do remember mine to...){kind=link}
Hello, I'm Mervi!
An artist, nerd and business sorcerer, dedicated to make world more beautiful and strange with art, illustrations and logos + to help you figure your sustainable business out.
My first website
While checking out some links for my new links page I wandered to Lealea Design blog and Lea Alcantara's entry about her first website (this post isn't available anymore). Yes I do remember mine too, though it was over 10 years ago, so the details are a bit mushy. 1998 I was 17 and I had quite recently found the miracles of Internet, including e-mail, IRC and obviously web. Okay, yes, I had been using some Internet services before, but only occasionally and I'd had my own PC, a little Intel machine with Windows 3.11, since I was 13. Back then having an Internet connection was still a rarity, especially in Finnish countryside.
It was high school (in Finnish: lukio) that gave me the opportunity to explore everything Internet and web could bring to my life. Of course soon enough sending messages and surfing online wasn't enough for me. I wanted to try and make my own site. It was a GeoCities site, under the RainForest "neighborhood". No, the site didn't have anything to do with conservation or ecological subjects, but the little hippie in me made the choice. SoHo might have been more appropriate.
My first site was simple and there was lots of white on it. I draw a little cat figure to use as buttons on the front page and I used crude cut and paste HTML. I used also the GeoCities HTML editor and I think the infamous Microsoft FrontPage was involved in the process too. I never liked FrontPage, so I don't recall using it much.
That's really how I first learned to make websites: "Reading" other sites and by trial and error. I was so proud as I got the site published. It was my own creation. Obviously some snarky nerd on IRC made fun of it, but what do they know? The content of the site included some poems and short stories I had written, a little info section and a couple of scanned photos of the cats of our family. All in Finnish. It's really unfortunate I don't have any screenshots of my first site or any of the later versions of it. It would show you my first steps on the world of web design.
