It's all about me!
by santeri ~ 22.11.09 02:16
I am a 18-year old upper secondary school student from Kouvola, Finland. I live with my parents, and I do all forms of web development on my spare time. I guess this website / web designs in general are my hobbies, as I am not studying them. If I wanted to do this for living I should've gone to a different school. Thats why I am just taking it easy and learning on my own phase.
My first step into the world of websites was my experiment using the infamous freewebs.com. I think it was the year 2004. Back then it was cool and easy to use. It required no knowledge about html whatsoever. During that time IRC-Galleria made its big break through as it started to get more and more users amongst the teenage population of Finland. Being a teenager myself, I registered too.
Soon I found out that IG users could mod their own profile site using a css template. I had minor knowledge about html, but had not seen a .css file before. I started to tweak the default css template, and refreshed the site to see what had changed. This way I learned alot about the template itself, but I didn't get to know css at all. I learned how to edit the comment box etc, but I did not know what html and css really had to do with each other. I found that out later but I did not care, I just did what I was good at; IG mods.
I think my problem was the lack of graphical knowledge. I used MSPaint to crop images, to insert text into banners etc. This all changed when I met Photoshop. Photoshop begun a new era in my life. At first I was confused with all the buttons and docked windows. I started to study by doing simple tutorials I found from the internet. I got familiar with the software pretty quickly. I also learned abit about compressing images for web usage. Photoshop gave my IG mods an great advantage.
After a year of just modding around IG and doing random graphics for my own usage, I realised that modding IG didn't really have the freedom to do whatever I wanted to do. Users were not allowed to touch the html file. But that would've been the same as making your own webpage from a scratch. I gave up doing IG mods and I started doing more and more graphics with Photoshop. Sometimes I designed a whole website template, but I didn't have the knowhow to build a website out of it.
In the spring of 2008 I saw an ad of an flash design contest. I decided to contribute. I didn't know anything about flash. I started the same way I started with Photoshop; I did all tutorials I could find. Best tutorials were found from Oman3d.com (nowadays its called Republic of Code). I never finished my piece for that contest, but I learned alot about flash. I actually found it very cool and versatile. I made up my mind and ordered a web space from Arkku.net. Virtuoosi.org was born.
I made my first official, built from scratch website using flash & actionscript. It had a sleek template and I still think it was one of the coolest sites I have done. On the other hand it had many downsides: it was very big in size and took ages to load, flash had compatibility problems and it was a pain in the backside to update. I continued to work on my flash skills, knowing that I wouldn't use them to make an entire website in the end.
Nowadays I have moved more towards html and css. I am still using flash embedded on my sites, but I wont make an entire site out of flash only. I think flash is a very cool way to add interactivity and movement to your site, whereas html and css can be used to create a simple and effective website. Together they form a very powerful duo which has all the capabilities you need in web publishing.