For its one year anniversary, 32-Bit Cafe asked: "what has creating a website done for you?"

Almost every good thing in my life can be traced back to getting online in the mid-90s, but since this question was specifically about creating websites, I went looking through some of my very old website thumbnails, including the very first website I designed for someone else's business, this extremely elegant combination of fonts and a double image I put together in late 1998:

gamer website layout

What was I thinking with that "logo"? No idea.

At the time, website design still mostly meant learning at least a bit of HTML, and so it wasn't uncommon for just about anybody to hire someone to make a basic site for them, so a friend was willing to pay me a few bucks to make a design for his webpage. He mailed me cash hidden in an envelope, and when I opened the mail that day I realized that this was a way better gig than the babysitting jobs I did, and my mind was blown.

I'd made my first website in 1996 or so, following the then-common arc of moving from GeoCities to a site hosted by a friend on her domain and then finally to a domain of my own in 1999 (when I asked my parents to pay for my first domain name registration for Christmas, because back then it was $70 for the first two years up front, a mind-boggling price now).

That same year I discovered that many of my small town schoolmates wanted files they'd heard existed on the internet but couldn't access for themselves, so I started selling reformatted AOL Online disks full of text files. I got a paypal account and an amazon account, and I could provide stuff to my classmates who couldn't access the books they wanted. Now they could, by paying me for copies mailed to my door.

Once I got to college, I offered website hosting to people who had to mail me cash, and therefore couldn't pay companies themselves. I made websites, I wrote essays, I did peoples' taxes. I bought at Goodwill and sold on ebay. None of it was ever a ton of money, all of it was wedged in around school and more traditional part time jobs like retail and more babysitting.

But what I learned was that people would pay me for all kinds of skills, things I didn't even know were special. Over the years, I've always had little experiments here and there- freelance writing jobs, other websites, divination. More than that, even when I was job-hunting and frustrated, I knew I had skills that people would pay for, and that I just needed the right chance to fit those skills into an opening.

Website Resources

Are you ready to make a website? It's fun! You totally should give it a shot if you've got any interest at all. You can spend an hour or two plunking around on Neocities and have a bare bones site up to play with. Admittedly I'm biased, because I've been doing this off and on since I the 90s, but code is fun. It's as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. If you're ready to give it a try, here are some of the links I like to have handy or I've found useful.