My love affair with websites

Have you been to certain websites and thought “Damn, that website looks so sophisticated and creative. I wonder how they do that?” Then again, maybe its because I’m interesting in this kinda thing – creating websites – since I was a kid.

I started getting hooked on the internet back in school. I even started blogging a little bit back then using a website that was aimed more for kids (well I was a kid back then) which was something like My Diary or something similar with colourful graphics and all.

After that I was enthralled by the world of HTML, the magical language that created all those great websites I see online. I decided to teach myself HTML – using nothing but Notepad. It was the trend then to create personal websites. Friendster, Myspace, Facebook and all those other social networking sites were not so popular then (were they even around yet? I don’t think so).

My most memorable incident related to webdesigning was in secondary school when 2 of my friends and I represented our school for this National webdesign competition – even though our school didn’t have a functional computer lab then. We were sent to take a course in Frontpage by the contest organizers. However, because it was such basic stuff (and we had a step-by-step handbook of screenshots of what to do) all of us installed CS in the computers in the training room and played CS instead. LOL!

So anyway, back to my opening question. I learned a lot about webdesigning by looking at the websites I liked and downloading the source code to see how they did it. Back then I didn’t know about programs that could copy web sites – including all the images, videos and codes.

Its actually been a while since I designed a proper website. Most clients all want it to be eye popping and animated so Flash is heavily used. Nowadays, I always feel like I’m not creative enough to be as good as the rest. Maybe I just need to find the time and the passion to try harder.