Every web-designer (professional or not) has something that introduced them to the joys and frustrations of the work. My intro was simple enough; I was required to take a basic computer class my freshman year of high school. Around the middle of the semester the teacher organized an after-school group that would meet to learn about HTML and making webpages. I hadn't done much with the web at that point, but I thought it sounded interesting, so I got permission from my parents and joined the group.

By the end of the school year I had created what I thought was the "perfect" page--a short, rather bland description of myself that gave no specific information whatsoever and a table with all ten of my favorite links, most of them school related. I had my dad upload my creation to the webspace provided by his ISP, then promptly forgot all about it.

That's where things stood for the next couple of years. I didn't do anything with HTML and more or less forgot everything I'd learned. Then I made some good friends who got me into anime and rekindled my interest in personal webpages at the same time. My first thought was that I could simply take the page I'd created two years before and update all the information, and possibly change the colors. I quickly changed my mind and started looking for a free web-host I could use, finally deciding on Angelfire.

Fast-forward to 04.03.2000, the date of my first entry on my original updates page. I'd taken about ten days to set up the basic structure of my page using Netscape Composer, a program I quickly became disenchanted with. After uploading everything and checking that it worked I needed to edit part of my code. Seeing the mess Composer made with said code I vowed to relearn HTML and never use a WYSIWYG editor again.

I wasn't with Angelfire for very long before I started looking for a service that had fewer ads. My solution at the time was xoom (later NBCi and now defunct) which offered unlimited free webspace. There were ads, but they were contained in a small, easily ignored frame at the top of the screen. This was quite a draw for me and I switched over, but things went from good to only so-so to "I need to get a different host for my site now." My solution? Move back to Angelfire. This actually proved to be a very wise move as NBCi killed all hosting just a few short months after I left.

By that time I was a bit more adventurous as far as web-design went, and I was teaching myself as much as I could by looking at other sites I liked. I learned a lot of things by trial and error, and developed my personal design preferences. Now I've been designing websites for myself and others for almost eight years, and I've even been paid to do so (only once so far, but that will change).

And that brings us to where I am today, the proud owner of a domain name (finally!) with a site hosted on my father's server. In many ways my layouts are more complex than they were eight years ago--frames require more than basic HTML, I've been doing a lot of image work, and I'm learning JavaScript--but simplicity has won out overall.