I feel like every time I blog here now I’m just talking about how busy I am…but it’s true. I’ve been blogging like crazy – at one point I wrote nine blog entries in just two days – but just not here. On the plus side, the other projects I’m working on are going really well. My new work showcase site should be finished and live before Monday. But I am neglecting Blossom.nu as usual, and as usual I’m going to be skipping straight to another project rather than working on my old faithful blog here.

I had an email from a girl called Cathenia a couple of weeks ago, who told me she’d written about Blossom on her blog here. It’s always a bit bittersweet reading stuff like that because it reminds of the old days, and also my current neglect of this site. It was a lovely email to receive though, and it also reminded me about how I got started with HTML. If my mum hadn’t seen Girland.com (a girly community type website for those not in the know – it went bankrupt several years ago) advertised when I was about 13 or 14, then my life would have been completely different. I made my first website almost by accident; it was convenient to have a list of HTML codes to copy and paste for Girland and share them with others when they asked. Before long I’d found about LissaExplains.com and bought a domain name and now, ten years later, my whole job and main hobbies stem from that. I got my first job at 19, a part time job at an e-learning software company, and that was the first time I’d witnessed people using HTML and other languages in a professional capacity. It seems so ridiculous now, but I remember being amazed that it was ‘a real thing’. Up until that point, coding and design had been a hobby for kids and teens to me.

Girland is actually pretty interesting in and of itself, because it was way before its time. There weren’t many kids’ sites back then, it was basically Girland or Neopets, and I flitted between the two for a few years. Girland is one of the first examples of successful gamification of a website, and even more unusually it was UK based. It had different aspects to it – forums, some basic games, problem pages and a mentorship system, amongst other things – all connected by your member profile. You could collect badges and points, and it was pretty addictive. Today it would have been absolutely huge amongst parents and kids, particularly as it was so carefully controlled and moderated in terms of topics and content. Unfortunately back then there was extremely little advertising potential and they just couldn’t monetise the site successfully. I’m not sure how they funded it in the first place to be honest as investors seem kind of unlikely, but I guess that’s a possibility.

It’s weird to think that without that one website – a forum for teenage girls – that I wouldn’t have domains, or the skills, or the experience, or the job I do now. I definitely wouldn’t have had the job opportunities I’ve had, and I wouldn’t have worked with the brands I have. There’s the concept that it was fate and that it would have happened somehow, but I’m glad it happened when it did. Any earlier and the internet would have been too sparse, too much later and I would probably have just been obsessed with social media (which is definitely delaying more people having their own self-hosted websites I think, particularly as teenagers).

So, how did you get into web design? :mrgreen: