…along came the Internet

I really can’t pinpoint the very first time I used the Internet, but I remember why and how it happened. It actually resulted from a totally different mix. I was in college late 1998, technically my junior year. I observed that fellow students like to have fast food at times, which wasn’t available on our campus at the time. The idea to make and sell burgers quickly dawned on me.

I required authorization for business on campus and a designated service area within the student union building and so I planned to write to the student union government. The building offered limited spaces through stiff competition, so my presentation had to be outstanding in order to get a space. I decided to start by designing a letterhead for our communication and there was only one way to go – the computer.

I had to patronize a graphics designer and fortunately, I also had to sit by the designer to ensure she understood my imagination. It was so much fun watching her maneuver the design software. I determined at that point that I can do this and decided within myself to pursue the required skills.

Now, email at this time was just gaining popularity in the late 90s through websites like yahoo and I understood how handy and neat it might be to have an email address so I had my elder brother who at the time was a Microsoft Certified Professional, create one for me. Till today, that address remains my only unchanging personal contact information.

Inspired by watching the graphic designer working, I went ahead to enroll for training in computer design. My first choice of software was macromedia director, a web animation software. Before this time, I had operated a few computers, but they were all offline. These training computers were online so I had the opportunity to play around my mailbox and surf the Internet.

At the turn of the millennium, I bought an advanced Photoshop book. It was quite expensive at the time, but after going cover to cover I grew wild with the software. Most of my creations were used on print, others were used on television and on the Internet.

In 2002, a client approached me on the need for a low budget communication package. I accepted the project, but when it came to the aspect of a website, I had to decide between hiring someone and working on it myself. I had never designed a website at that point, but I observed that many desktop applications will create webpages.

I designed a few webpages based on specified content and linked them together in Microsoft FrontPage. I previewed the site and went ahead to show the client. I also proposed the cost of hiring a professional as against using what I created. The client was ready to go with my creation and so I uploaded it. It was quite heavy and took so much time to load, but I had just published my first website.