Kaonashi Ga Suki

What was your first attempt at a website?

1996: My First Try
I was exposed to the Internet for the first time as a young, wet-behind-the-ears UCLA Freshman back in 1995. Although I have had experience with computers in general since I was in 5th grade, the Internet was a whole new world to me. About a year later my friend (now my boyfriend) influenced me to create my own website (he had created one too). How fun! My first mark on the Internet.

Actually, it wasn’t a website- more of a webpage. I built it using Tripod, which was free at the time. I had absolutely no HTML skills whatsoever, but it was ok since Tripod had a handy dandy Page Builder program that did the job for you, and all you had to do was fill in the necessary information. Ah, those were the days. I was a huge X-Files fan and my page’s layout reflected it. Ok, there really was no layout. It just had a black background with white font, and lime green links. Oooo, spooky!

This webpage also contained little content. It was basically just an area where I put my favorite links. There was a brief “Hello, welcome to my website!” paragraph, but the rest was just a list of links. There was a stat counter on the site, and I cheated by refreshing the page about a hundred times to make it look like people other than me actually visited my page. Yes- lame, I know.

Sadly, I didn’t know what else to put on it. I had no idea what kind of page it would be. I was far too inexperienced with the Internet at the time to dream up something cool. Thus, the page went to a quiet death.

2002: My Second Try
For the next 5 years in college I didn’t really see a need to make another website since I found it was more fun to check out other websites instead, not to mention that I was sucked into the dreaded allure of chatrooms (IRC is evil. EVIL!). Also, I had gained a life in the real world and was often out partying on weekends (which in college terms, translated to Thursday-Sunday). Then after I graduated, I went to Japan for a while and relied on internet cafes to keep me in contact with the U.S. No time to make my own site.

When I returned from my sojourn, I started looking for a job- something small and temporary that I can do while I apply to grad school. And lo, it took a while to find a job. About 7 months. Meanwhile my dad urged me to find alternative methods in making money.

“Why don’t you check out those ‘Work From Home’ sites?” he suggested.

“Those are ripoffs ya know,” I argued.

“You don’t know that! Just give it a try. See here,” he pointed to an ad he got from his email. “This woman makes $10,000 a month stuffing envelopes. You can easily do that!”

I was getting somewhat desperate at this point (not to mention that I wanted to get my dad off my back), so I decided to research these “work from home” sites. I found one that seemed ok: basically the idea was to run a site similar to Amazon, and I would get a cut whenever someone ordered from the site. There were two problems:

1.) Amazon sells much cheaper stuff.
2.) I didn’t realize I had to advertise. A lot. And it cost money.

I created my second website to help generate free advertising for this stupid online store. But what kind of website would it be? Hmmm…I know! A movie review site! But not just any review site. It would be a site in which people would write their own movie reviews and submit them to me. I called it, “Review it Yourself”. Catchy, eh? To be honest, I still think that the premise is pretty cool and that I did a pretty good job on it. Of course, most of the reviews were by me and members of my family.

I got free hosting from 0 Catch, and built the site using MS Frontpage. Oh yes, I had come a long way from 1996. I now had some mad HTML skillz. Ok, not a lot but still- a lot better than my first attempt. Man, it was elaborate. I had individual pages for each movie and also divided the movies alphabetically. I had a “Top 10″ on the main page in which I’d have links to items from my online store that reflected the movies featured in the “Top 10″. For example, if Men in Black 2 was in the “Top 10″, then I’d have a link to a DVD of MIB I, which you can purchase from my store. Yes, very similar to Amazon indeed.

To no one’s surprise, I never made a single dime from the online store. Furthermore, studying for the GRE, applying to grad school, and finally getting a real job ate up a lot of my time so I was unable to update my site. It too, died a quick and quiet death.

2004: Third Time’s the Charm, Eh?
My most recent attempt at a site was in July of last year, when I started a blog. I got the idea when my friend started his own, and after visiting his I thought that it would be such a cool idea. Being naive to the blog world, I went on Google and typed in “blog”. Lo and behold, I was introduced to Blogger, which simultaneously became my friend and archnemesis.

Blogger is like the Fisher-Price of the blogging platforms. It’s very simple to use, which is great for people who are just in it for the writing and don’t really tinker with anything else. But you can also learn a lot from it, and not only did I learn more HTML, I learned about the magic of CSS from Blogger. I also learned that you should copy and paste their text onto MS Word or Notepad before hitting the “publish” button, or else Blogger will eat it and make sure you never, ever get it back.

Now I’ve moved on to WordPress, and yes, I like it. Very much. It’s harder to figure out than Blogger, but at least it doesn’t eat my posts.

Now that I’ve told my story, how about sharing yours?