About
Site History
I started making websites when I was around ten years old when Piczo was all the rage with everyone at my school and everyone seemed to have made a site with it. It seemed great at the time and really easy to use, but it was full of banner advertisements and glitter graphics, coloured scrollbars etc. Quite tacky, really. Still, I kept that site up for a good while and soon got bored, so made a new one under a different name which sounded less childish. My original site had a name like xxxEmmzSitexxx.piczo.com which was crap, to be honest.
Soon I came to my senses and got rid of all the glitter graphics and flashing text, opting for the 'weborexic' trend that many sites seemed to sport (and some still do, unfortunately). The text was incredibly difficult to read, and sported the 7px Small Fonts trend, which everyone seemed to follow religiously. Nothing came of those sites, and looking back I understand why, it was stolen celebrity photos galore.
Freewebs seemed like a more professional option a couple of years ago, and so changed hosts and began making sites and learning basic HTML through that. Iframes made an appearance on it, and I thought it looked really professional when all the pages followed the same style and theme. No adverts were placed on my site, and that made it 10 times better in itself. It's all changed now though. I closed my Freewebs site and went back to Piczo. I spent a while making more celebrity graphics-orientated sites, one getting quite popular - but I quickly lost interest when it got boring and stuff at school was building up.
In 2007, I found Awardspace and signed up to it, and began making sites still using HTML. Iframes were still being used, even though I really wanted to get rid of them - it got really annoying having to keep extending the page to fit all the information on it so no scrollbar showed up in the frame. I began visiting sites such as Petshopgirlsreviews.com and Jemjabella.co.uk - sites with owners who knew what they were talking about who didn't make layouts using stolen celebrity photos and crappy tutorials.
Soon, the Iframes were scrapped once and for all and I learned PHP includes. It seemed really hard to understand at first, but I kept trying and it was actually quite easy. I converted my site from the Iframes and it looks a hundred times better.
I now own this site, and I think it's the best I've done so far, but I'm still learning so I will hopefully get better as I get older.