It was during the winter of 1995-1996 that I was introduced to the World Wide Web, and shortly thereafter to HTML. My first web site was typical of most designed by people just discovering the web, and how easy it is to publish on it; busy background, light on content but full of vows of imminent improvement.

My first web site, cryptically entitled "The Fort of Magic Cocoa Berries." The story behind the name is too long and inconsequential to repeat here.

The photograph is a black and white self-portrait, with sepia-tone added digitally; I was also discovering Adobe Photoshop at the time, and many of my early efforts made extensive use of stock Photoshop filters.

By fall of 1996 I knew for certain that I wanted to "do web stuff" for a living. I was facing two obstacles at that point; my own lack of experience and knowledge, and a relative scarcity of jobs. I'm not certain when the so-called Dot Com Boom is officially supposed to have begun in earnest, but I can attest to the fact that there weren't a whole lot of web-related job listings in the Los Angeles Times in late 1996 and early 1997.

By day I was working at a special effects shop, and by night I was teaching myself everything I could about HTML and web graphic design, authoring pages in MS Notepad and creating graphics with Adobe Photodeluxe. In the fall of 1996 I had devoted much time to a self-styled "E-zine", but never had the tenacity to see it through. In retrospect what I was trying to do was write a blog, but at the time it didn't occur to me to write about anything so mundane as my own day to day experiences.

By 1997, however, I reckoned that I was getting good enough at building web pages that I might feasably get hired by somebody for that express purpose. My only explanation for the site design that follows is that I must have paged through a copy of Creating Killer Websites not long before starting it. From a usability standpoint, the interface is so laughably obtuse that it makes me cringe... from a design standpoint, I still sort of like it. The graphics were created with a shareware, very basic raytracing application whose name I can't remember. Clicking on one of the numbered spheres at the bottom of the page would take the user to a different section of the site; my rationalization for using numbers instead of clearly labelled, easy to read buttons was that visitors to the site would be so darn intrigued by those spheres that of course they would click on each one to see what it was all about. This was the same school of thought that gave us the "Splash Screen".

My home page, circa early 1997.

A secondary page on which I decided, for some reason, that it would be a good idea to use a giant graphic for the introductory paragraphs instead of good old searchable, copy and paste-able, ASCII text. Note the helpful instructions. What was I thinking?

As spring gave way to summer I found myself working at a different effects shop, where I had the opportunity to cut my teeth on honest to goodness Web Design with a capital "WD". The experience I gained by building a functional, useful company web site apparently filtered down to the stuff I was doing in my spare time, and I overhauled my web site yet again.

My homepage during the summer of 1997. Another splash page of sorts, but at least things are clearly labelled. This was also my first use of sliced images and visual layout through HTML tables.

At the time, I believe the HTML used on this page was tailored to 3.0 browsers and written so that all of the graphic elements would fit flush against each other. This modern-day Mozilla screenshot breaks things up a little bit, but since it does do a good job of demonstrating the image slicing and table structure I've left it alone for this screenshot. Six years later, I actually sort of like the fragmented look.

A content page from my summer 1997 web site. The influence of the Killer Websites mindset is evident; white, monospaced text on a black background? A skinny column of text that wastes most of the screen real estate? Visually I think it still looks pretty nice for 1997, but I was definitely guilty of subverting HTML into a page description language.

As 1997 drew to a close, I felt that the experience I had gained designing the shop web site would be enough to secure myself an entry-level position doing web design full-time; at the shop my time was divided between web design, painting Darth Vader helmets, and working on random projects throughout the shop. Towards that end I put together a dry, resume/portfolio type web site:

This was the first of several personal web sites I've designed since that used warm and/or earthy colors, and strong lines. At the time, I thought it was important to put together something clean and clearly original; by late 1997 there were lots of people calling themselves web designers who filled their pages with clip art backgrounds, animated clip art GIFs, and god-awful Java applet navigation panels. By giving most of my attention to a consistent color scheme and careful layout, I hoped to demonstrate that I had both design sense and HTML coding ability.

It was this web site (along with my strange special effects/graphic design/web design resume) that helped get me my first true web design job, building WebTV-optimized pages for a multilevel marketing company in January of 1998.

Looking back at my experience at FutureNet Online I can't honestly say that I regret the time I spent there; I gained a lot of design experience there, learned JavaScript, learned a lot about human nature, and made some lasting friendships. However, that was a rough 7 months; I had been working there for about three months when the FTC raided the company for running an illegal pyramid scheme.

The company was shut down for about two weeks, during which time I put together a new iteration of my resume and portfolio site.

My 1998 home page, a design that I regard as my first real, professionally designed personal web site. Even after a few short months I had learned a lot about practical web design at Futurenet; developing for WebTV required its own attention to detail and optimization.

A content page from my spring, 1998 web site. The Frank Lloyd Wright/Arts & Crafts influence is readily apparent. I had been interested in Wright's work since an American architectural history elective I had taken in school, and by 1998 there were dozens of Wright-related sites to be found all over the web. Wright's style was a great inspiration to me at a time when I didn't have much to be inspired by, and I think my ambition to get beyond the shaky situation at FutureNet clearly shows in this site design. It was shortly after I designed this site that I became a docent at the Ennis-Brown House and designed their web site.

As the situation continued to unravel at FutureNet, I began once again to search for another job. That search led to a "Production Assistant" position at Edmund Publications. I worked at Edmunds for the next year and a half, and I remember my time there fondly.

With the security of a new job at a company I admired and trusted came a flood of optimism and reborn interest in putting together a content-driven personal web site, which I dubbed Randomonium (with a nod to the Frank Zappa bootleg album of the same name.) In retrospect what I was trying to do was write a blog, but I got too wrapped up in writing "Articles" for some imagined audience when I should have been just blathering about my personal life, as so many are these days.

The home page of my short-lived protoblog, Randomonium. The design was heavily inspired by the googie architecture of southern California, in particular the Sundown Drive-In theatre.

Another page from the Randomonium web site. I dabbled briefly with Cascading Stylesheets when building this site, but abandoned the idea because of Netscape 4's poor support.

For most of 1999-2000 I was working Dot Com hours and volunteering as a docent at two Frank Lloyd Wright houses in Los Angeles. The last thing I wanted to look at when I got home at night was my own web site. I also had the good fortune during this period to do a couple of freelance sites, and I began and abandoned several different designs over those two years, each one tailored to function as a freelance contractor's resume, portfolio, and list of services.

None of them were very inspired, but the warm, earth tones resurfaced:

A short-lived web site from 1999. The decidedly greenish tinge to the color scheme can probably be attributed to the fact that my main home computer at the time was a laptop. The heavy-handed Da Vinci / old architectural sketch motif was probably inspired by the discovery of the font used for the main title graphic.

The weblog site I started in 2001 was going strong as the new year came and went, but beginning in March of 2002 I got caught up with a very large project at work that detracted from my blogging efforts. When plans for my cross-country move began to crystalize, I was further distracted from keeping up with the site.

The other factor was that my home-grown content management system was outgrowing itself, and it had gotten so kludgey that I didn't want to spend more time on it unless I was going to rebuild from the ground up. Around this time I began playing with Wikis, and I thought it would be interesting to try implementing one as a personal web site.

My PhpWiki-based homepage. I designed a custom template that removed most of the public collaboration features native to Wikis, and I used Gogle's SOAP API to do create automatic links to the top five matches for a keyword search of each page title.

After arriving in Massachusetts it was time to put up a new Resume/Portfolio site. I took the opportunity to start from scratch yet again, and build a completely W3C-compliant web site using XHTML and CSS.

The home page of my Resume/Portfolio web site from late 2002. Since I wanted to demonstrate my design abilites as well as my coding skills, I opted for a very graphic home page; as originally conceived the site was very basic, having only a few very self-explanatory sections.

A content page from my Fall, 2002 web site. For the most part, pages consist of handcoded XHTML, using a centrally linked stylesheet for nearly all of the visual presentation. PHP was used to generate navigation links, log page hits, and provide recent keyword and backlink statistics on each page.