Web Design

I think it was around 1995, 1996 or so that I built my first website that was actually viewable on the web. Prior to that I had played with coding and designing but never published it.
 My first site, I believe, was on Geocities before the whole yahoo buyout. I started by taking webpages I liked from different places, dissecting them and learning key html encoding and a few javascript lines. It was a simple website that basically said “hey I’m here and this is what I like.”
After that I moved on a little and toyed with Microsoft Word, if you really want a basic page you can use Word and save as HTML. This way a small improvement from using notepad, although I still used it to clean things up a little and make subtle changes that word wasn’t capable of.
About half way through High School I found Frontpage and found it to be similar to word in the manor of design. I ended up by this point playing a lot wit frames. Such as I had a menu of poems on my site that was on the left pane, when clicked they would open in the center pane. That was the direction my website had taken me, a way of showcasing my poetry.
It was also around this time that I started developing a website for Camp Wynola, it was their first site and I was excited to help. Later I would also help the with thekingslife.com as a promotional site for one of their summer camps.
I forget exactly when, but when yahoo got involved with geocities and I started seeing ads like crazy on the site, I decided to move to Angelfire. Which also later added ads, but it was roughly the same site with a slightly different look. I also started a blog with them at that point.
Later in 2001 or 2002 while in college I took a class on web design. We studied Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, Photoshop, etc. I had dabbled with these prior, but really got to like using Dreamweaver. It is Dreamweaver that I used to updated the site for Camp Wynola and while in that class, we as a class, built a site for the Neurosomatic Science Foundation (I hope I got that name right), it was a very professional site and we use all of the above tools.
From there I was using dreamweaver on my on site there at Anglefire until shortly after I finished college and got a job with CompUSA, they were a good company back then. In any case, in was at this time in 2005, I believe that I got a .mac account and found a way to use dreamweaver to publish to it. And so I did, it was work of art that I took down just before this site design. Some of you may remember it, it had my poetry, my music, my photographs, my blog (which had moved to blogspot) and more.
Recently, I redesigned the whole site on my Apple Powerbook G4 and the iweb application. I still wonder if there are improvements I can make? But in all its been a fun journey that I can stop traveling down. From my younger days of copying and pasting code with Word and Notepad to today where I simply drag and drop with iweb. What a joy, but where shall Web Design take me from here....