It was the year 2000 when I first began browsing the World Wide Web. Although in my mind it seems ages ago, it is only seven years. Time goes fast, especially online. So, my online career began on the Buffy Chat (which has been down for a while), where I met the most amazing people. They introduced me to the world of English-speaking individuals and brushed up my English-writing skills. One of said individuals even introduced me to the world of websites and webdesign. Her name is Emma and you can find her at Falling-For-You.

The first website I created was Dollz Hell. It featured all those tiny little drag n’ drop maker dolls which took about five minutes each to create. I had no idea how to do design, so I ended up with a purple/pinkish, ugly, horrible table layout. Unfortunately, the site is no longer online nowadays, but you can probably imagine the uglyness of it all. It had no coding whatsoever, looked like it came straight from hell and well…I still have nightmares about it.

I moved on to using a premade layout, since I could not create one for the sake of it. A new website was installed along the same lines as the previous one, this time entitled MysteryDollz. Notice the fact I still wrote dolls with a ‘z’ and loved making them little cartoondolls. Yuck. Although the website is, fortunately, on Hiatus, you can click here to see some of it.

I discovered new things and developed myself into an official cartoon doller. Xandorra’s Place was the first website I stumbled upon that made her own cartoon dolls and well, lets say I got inspired. I joined her forum, TG (The Gathering) and lived through many happy moments there. Around summer time of the year 2005, I took another shot at webdesigning and created two websites at once. ElvenMysteries became my dolling archive (and was the first website featuring at actually not-all-that-bad layout made by yours truly) and Morgans Graphix was an online showcase of my designing abilities (or disabilities). Shortly after that I bought my own domain name.

I would like to thank Geocities for hosting me all those years, but nevertheless I was thrilled to have a website of my own where I could do whatever the heck I wanted to without the annoying pop ups! ElvenMysteries.com was born. At first, it would only be a pixel website, but it soon grew to be much more.

My first personal website was born soon afterwards. It was called Enchanted Whispers and even though no more pages of it were saved, here you can see some of its past layouts: Corpse Bride, Elisa Cuthbert, Winter’s Sonata, Pirates of the Caribbean and  Gangs of New York. As you might have already noticed, I was really into films then and did not know that much about copyright either (as in, stealing copyrighted images…) But, on the other hand, everything was still the Web 1.0 back then and nobody really seemed to know the meaning of the word ‘copyright’.

Enchanted Whispers died a horrible death because it got abandoned by none other than yours truly. A new domain name came in its place, party-girl.org. I had made plans for buying the domain name, but never really got to it since by the time I saved enough money, it was already taken. After I discovered that, I pretty much abandoned the website again since I really found no other domain name that fitted me closely. Again, some layouts were saved from eternal death: Nicole Kidman, One Night in Paris and Party-Girl.Org. The last one did not even make it up. My personal favourite layout so far must have been One Night in Paris since it mostly featured pictures taken by me when I was out with my class on a trip to Paris. By this time I had completely dumped Cutenews as my comment system and began creating websites using WordPress.

Ever since August, I had been playing with the idea of creating a new, personal website (after Party-Girl.org died out) and that was the beginning of Zwinkyness. I believe that in all, it is an improvement and certainly displays my knowledge of coding, designing and accessibility. The difference between Zwinkyness and the website I had before are certainly its standards: valid coding, web 2.0 design, accessible, usable, etc. I am very proud of what I have achieved so far during my online life and hope to achieve even more in the future.