It began in 2009, when a new classmate mentioned he built websites. Until that moment, the web felt distant, something built by extra ordinary people, not someone like me.
I’d always been fascinated by the idea of internet but it felt out of reach. Hearing that someone from my own class had made websites made it suddenly seem possible.
I searched how to built one myself and found early no-code tools like webs.com, webspot.com , and few others I don’t recall.What I do remember is staring at an empty homepage with a wide grin and a thrill that it existed at all, a website without content, without purpose but made by me in the world wide web, it was intoxicating.
Eventually, the webs.com led me to blogspot.com and my first experiment. A blog about cars, in my regional language and with a prebuilt blogspot theme and it was called onthewheels.in, its gone now, but back then It felt was a mix of my profound passion for cars and the newly found passion, to build.
Even though, I dabbled in html by that time, it was tedious for me to remember the basic structure of it and I went with the comfort route of using prebuilt blogspot themes from other sites and started modifying the code with a WYSIWYG tool from Adobe named Dreamweaver that made me feel like I was cheating, but it suited my then purpose.
Thrill of seeing something that you made in web
The feel of having something that I built online and few people were using it gave me a kick I never felt before, the numbers were abysmal, but that was enough.
It pushed me deeper. I started exploring google’s webmaster tools and discovered SEO for the first time and stumbled into the concepts of like readability and accessibility without knowing what it was called.
Since the blog was in regional language, Readers had to manually install the font to view the site correctly. That friction bothered me and the quest to solve led me to google transliteration, an early way to render regional languages online.
All these experience, of finding the SEO, making the site further accessible for SEO through alt texts, having a font that is served through an API, was to aid my users no matter how small they were. Looking back, that instinct of making my website a better place than it was feels alot like my early steps towards UX design.
How I knew nothing about design but curious about building a cleaner website
I didn’t know anything about design then, but I knew when something didnt feel right. I wanted my site to look cleaner, to make reading easier and scanning faster, but I didnt understand how templates worked, it all felt like someone else’s magic I was borrowing.
At the time, the web was cluttered with banners and square ads. I thought that was normal until I came across gatesnotes.com, Bill gate’s personal blog. It was clean, spacious, and purposeful. It made me realize that layout, typography and color could change how something is felt.
That led me to CSS, and with Firebug, Mozilla’s old browser inspector, I began poking at selectors, changing colors, spacing and fonts trying to make my corner of the web a little bit tidy.