Welcome to 2007*!
*not necessarily 2007
As a kid, I actually grew up with a little bit of programming experience. At the time my dad was (and still is) a software engineer, at the time with a subscription to the Microsoft Developer Network, MSDN. Because of that, we were able to download a lot of interesting software programs to try and build "apps." At the time these "apps" did very little -- I remember as a kid dragging a "button" element onto a Visual Basic window and labeling it "Pepper" to "force" my dad to sneeze, but something I definitely did do at home was design webpages, using Microsoft FrontPage.
Microsoft FrontPage 2003
Microsoft FrontPage, a WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editor offered by Microsoft, was my first exposure to web design years and years ago. I remember making a group of websites, each under the same theme and structure, for a group of fictitious businesses. I remember pulling the exact clip art I wanted, and going through different wizards to pick what button styles I wanted and how I wanted the table layout to work, and as a kid I was pretty proud of those websites.
Over time those websites have gone, as the old hard drive got infected and died. But I will always
remember using FrontPage all those years ago, one of my key stepping stones to creating things on
the computer. While I can't find the exact clip art logo, or the exact button styles, I've tried
my best here to show what those old sites used to look like, except this time with actually valid
and hand-made CSS and HTML. There are some actual HTML5 features here now, like the semantic
<nav> tags used for the buttons on the left. The design may look cringy and
horrible today, but these designs were a part of my childhood that put me on a path towards
creating and coding.