In 1996 I had my first introduction to web publishing, via internet chat rooms where many of the participants had their own homepage. How cool! I wanted one!
I went to Geocities Homestead and created my first homepage, using the simple online tools they had back then. I started making web pages offline in Netscape Composer and learning more about this HTML stuff. I was hooked!
I created hobby pages, family pages and Lissa Jane’s Dogicons. I signed up as a volunteer web author with my State Library and created web sites for various community groups.
My volunteer work was a useful addition to my CV and helped me get a job with an internet provider company, maintaining their company web sites and creating sites for customers. It was during this time that my learning curve went off the scale, as I learned about domain names, web hosting and cgi programming.
In the last ten years the face of web publishing has changed considerably and it is a challenge to keep up with emerging standards. I am developing sites in XHTML and CSS now, with strict separation of structure and layout in the code. The result is pure joy. I love organising information and giving form to function.
I tend to struggle with design concepts but there are many tools to overcome this deficiency – my current favourite is Xara Webstyle. And the web itself is a constant source of inspiration – a beautiful place to wander is the CSS Zen Garden.
There are many online resources for teaching yourself about creating web pages; Webmonkey was one of the first such sites I discovered, and is a term used to describe people who enjoy playing with code.