I was in university and playing quake like crazy. I'm talking the 5-6 hours a day variety of addiction...can anyone guess why I dropped out of uni? Course, on the plus side I'm pretty good at fps now :)

Anyway, the team I was part of had member pages and we were all allowed to make our own. One of the guys I played with was a pretty good web designer and helped me get my page created and it just snowballed from there.

Went into college for programming and it just seemed that every co-op job I got wanted me to do web design or front-end design. Started freelancing and I haven't looked back.

It started for me about 9 years ago. We got internet access at my old job and I loved going to chat rooms and talking to people in different places around the globe. I noticed some of them had their own webpages (usually with geocities). So I got myself a geocities account. I actually still have it, but don't use it. I saw some things that other people had on their sites and wanted to learn how do to it, so I looked at the HTML source code and figured things out.

Then I discovered MS Frontpage and was "wowed" I well in love with it, not knowing anything about the enormous amounts of unnecessary code it added. I did a couple of websites using FP, then a friend turned me onto Dreamweaver. So I started using that as a WYSIWYG editor.

I was then drawn into the wonderful world of PHP and MySQL. Was reading a book on PHP/MySQL for about 2 weeks and was about to give up, then suddenly it clicked and I picked it up very easily.

Then I found out that there were actually web standards. So, I stopped using the "Design View" of DW and started coding more by hand. Started learning CSS and XHTML, stumbled upon OWD, was wowed by the community, and here I am today.....still learning more and more about CSS, XHTML and PHP.

Well In middle school I learned that my friends were making website and I had no idea how it was done. For all I knew it was magic. Well I got suspended for stupid reasons. That kept me out of school for 2 weeks. So in my spare time (which was all the time) I pushed back the boundaries of knowing only how to operate Solitaire and made the crappiest website I've ever seen. Never really got into a WYSIWYG editor. Been with notepad for years then moved to scintilla.

I found OSWD.org one night and was completely blown away. At that time I was using tables for everything and have since dropped that for CSS and XHTML. Along side everyone here. I don't really look back much.

I learned HTML in grade 7 summer camp. I taught a friend of mine, and we made sites for a while. One day, while looking for music artists, I met Andreas. I learned by picking apart his designs, and then I built one of my own using bad syntax. I have since gotten better at syntax, but I never used WYSIWYG, or did Mockups. Some of my notes at school (hand-written) have <h1> and <p> tags because now I think in code.

I started writing html 4 when I was 9 years old. I still have the book ... "teach yourself html 4 in 24 hours"....but i don't use it anymore

...I learned how to do everything in the entire book...by the end I was able to make great frame based websites, and since they never made it to the internet it didn't mater that they were a few Mb per page and made exclusively from images that I created by taking screen shots of MS Word documents ...

about one year ago I downloaded a template from OSWD because it was really nice, but could not understand how they made it work...when I saw that there was also a file called 'style.css' I realized how cool this was. My html book had inline styles, but a separate file made it so much easier since all the 'p' and 'h1' and etc. would be styled at once...

from there on I have been practicing my skills when I have time. I am now starting a web design company since there are so many people and businesses in my city and no web design companies...I am hoping to use the money I earn to pay for my college (2009)...when I have time I am going to clean up some of my designs so that they will be easy to edit and then submit them to OD.

P.S. how many members do we have here @ OD?

@gnome, actually i have thought about doing that. it really helps organize notes and such in an easy to remember format

I first got interested, I think in 1996?, when I got my first taste of the web at my local college. I used Frontpage for a while making those hideous tabled monsters and then forgot about it for a few years.

When I rediscovered web design everything had changed and CSS was the in-thing. That was maybe 3 - 4 years ago now.

I'm not a designer. There is not a creative bone in my body when it comes to that sort of thing. However...I still had a start.

Well, I started getting interested in this sort of thing before the popularity of the World Wide Web (early 90s). At that time, I ran a BBS with a friend. I did all the programming, added all the new functionality, and he designed all our menus, etc (ANSI art). I knew then that this is the sort of thing I wanted to do, so I concentrated on computers, learned to repair/build them, some programming, then all about networking (CCNA/CCDA). I started working as a network tech at a law firm in San Diego, but lost my job due to politics (law firms are bad that way). Anyway, my parents were in the auto-transport business, and needed someone to fill a spot in their company, so they asked if I would fill it while I looked for another job. I did, and much to my dismay, they were dispatching all their freight using 4'x8' whiteboards (5 of them when I started). I tried to find a program that they could start using, but there was nothing out there that worked well for their industry, so I offered to make one. After doing some research, I decided to make it web-based, since they had offices in multiple states...and EZDispatch was born. You'll notice it could use a makeover, but it's extremely functional, stable, easy to use, and feature rich. Since then, I've done nothing but programming of web-based apps (full-time).

My latest thing is that I'm going to be starting my own software company that specializes in web-based applications (Xavisys). Maybe I'll do a design contest for it soon...I'm going to need something good.

@aaron: YAY! I ran a bbs back in the day as well, I do miss those days. It's amazing how many designers started out with those boxy based design's, myself included. So I'm assuming, this makes us "Old School" :D

Ahhh...the summer of '94. I was designing trade show booths and the company I was working for asked to do their site. These were the days of Mosaic, gray backgrounds, and when beveled buttons were the rage.

When I was 10 years old my uncle (a Computer Sciences Professor at NMSU) taught me how to build IBM PCs from scratch; how to fix them, and all.

When I turned 11, he introduced me to Visual Basic 4.0. At the time I got started with VB, I was hanging out in the little h4x0r chat rooms on AOL (the good old days of the vb and vb4 chats) and eventually picked up the awkward nickname "Nasdaq" (don't ask). I met one of my closest friends in these chatrooms - his name was Casey, and he gave me a lowdown on writing programs with VB that completely screwed up AOL and its features. Before I turned 12, him and a number of us had picked up interest in making web sites.

I started my first web site on Angelfire; it was a web site surrounding my infatuation with Pokemon (once again: do not ask). And I showed it off to a bunch of kids at my middle school who had absolutely no clue what I was talking about or what the significance of my web site was. Casey picked up on it and wanted me to shut it down and do something a little better.

So in 1999, at 12, I created my first web site using Adobe Photoshop 4 and Notepad. I called it "Green In Ireland", and it became the staple of my design from then on to focus on the fusion of nature and technology when designing.

In 2000 I registered revolutionize.com (I still can't find it in the archives, but it did get registered!) and that domain was mine through the first half of 2002. In 2002, I was asked by the police to take it down when e-mails I received from kids at school that were laced with homophobic language (I came out in 2001) were posted on the web site with their full names in retaliation for their actions - unfortunately, a couple of people who went to school with me used those e-mails to justify beating up one of the kids (I hated that).

Let's see... in 2002, I abandoned web design and web development; I hit a very rocky road where I was in and out of mental hospitals, so I wasn't able to get to a computer. That wasn't over until late 2004.

In 2004, I was hired as the Lead Designer & Developer for one of the most significant internet companies in southern New Mexico. Later in 2004, I left my old boss to pursue freelancing. I picked up a horse ranch and, in early 2005, a trucking company.

In summer 2005, I moved to Arizona with my family. I decided to end my work with web design and development and pick up writing (of which I had been published in 17 books since 2000) more often.

Then came last year. =/

I met my ex in early 2006; By summer 2006, that relationship was over, and in June I was admitted to another hospital after I attempted suicide to get away from my ex. 2 weeks later, they let me out; and I spent from then through September being a guinea pig for anti-depressants and sedatives. In October, I picked up a $30,000 project; but I had to red flag the client for being disrespectful, constant deadline changes, etc.

And here I am today. Getting my first step into Template design and hoping I don't have to walk into the same mess all over again

Oh yeah, all the bad stuff has been sorted out, and work is kind of like walking into an empty house but having everything you need to fill it beforehand, without knowing how the house will look. I spend a lot of time trying to reach out to teenagers who have had to struggle emotionally like I have, and I take emotional struggle a bit more serious than everybody else does because I started from just a kid who felt like people didn't think he was "cool" and evolved into a kid who wouldn't leave the house for over half of 2004 (I spent over 6 months in my house, and didn't even set foot in the backyard).

So that's why I'm designing now... To hopefully cut down a bunch of weeds that have screwed up my garden and plant something prettier than the garden I've had... this is how I got up to designing now... And some TMI for the community

(Potential clients: my life is an open book, and I discuss it freely with whoever is around - if you don't want to hear it then just say so )

For me, it started with Neopets in Grade 5.