I wonder how many people have entered this competition and not actually entered the very first website they did because they are not too proud of it. When I look back at my first ever website design I cannot say 100% that I do it with pride!
This website was created in 2003 and was my first ever toe dipping experience into freelance web design and development. It was created in Microsoft Front Page – I know don’t say it, I moved onto the dizzy heights of Microsoft Expression Web after that! After working with the Microsoft melange, Adobe didn’t need to do much at all to sell itself to me and I took up with Creative Suite pretty soon.
The website was created to market our holiday rental property in Turkey. In terms of SEO this was a pretty good site, it got lots of visitors and enquiries and was fully booked every year after the second year. Also my first ever logo design, enough said there I think. Those were the days when SEO involved getting yourself in as many directories as possible and I certainly succeeded with that, definitely quantity of backlinks rather than quality.
And so it went from there ….
Building this site did make me realise how much I enjoyed the whole experience and it was from there I decided get some training in so that I could turn my hand to becoming a professional freelance web designer. It was a big learning curve and I continue learn something new every day, which is not difficult in this industry. I now design and develop fully responsive websites on the WordPress platform and I absolutely love it! Whilst in hindsight this website is very amateurish I will always be grateful to it for helping me to move onto a career that is hugely satisfying and makes me smile, often 🙂
I was invited to write this blog post for the first website competition, needless to say I did not win but I came a very acceptable third!
