Nightwish


My favourite band. The topic of my best poem, and more importantly, my first ever website. It was a school project back in high school, the first time I started learning HTML and CSS. It became a pretty basic website with minimal designing and mostly text. Then for the next two years, I pretty much forgot everything about web design.
Before joining the university, I bought my first domain. Damn, I wrote first, even though I only have one… I guess I plan on more projects later. I grew to like this overall. So with my new domain, I created an email alias, so now my email is cooler. Fantastic! But how else could I use it? A personal website, or course. First I looked at website builders, but I was sure about one thing – I’m not going to pay for something I can do myself a hundred thousand times the time. I actually built a cool website design with Canva, only to find out that I have to pay if I want to actually publish it. Sounds a little bit like a borderline illegal marketing technique, but okay. So I went my way – spending a hundred thousand times more time on it, but doing so for free.
So I sat down to my laptop and opened a new index.html file. I typed the opening and closing bracket for the <head> and <body>, then I took a deep breath, and…. realized I remember exactly nothing from my prior studies. The next few days I spent on relearning the basics. Then I filled the website with content. Easy part done. Because on Canva constructing a design is easy, but making it reality is another question. I realized that my CSS-knowledge is subpar to put it gently. I had to learn everything from how to choose custom fonts to animations. The biggest problem, however, turned out to be the text behind another text. My idea was to put the “title” of the contact information part behind the lines of the contact information itself. In Canva it took about a generous 3 seconds to do that, and with CSS I spent about a week fixing that. And even now it is not perfect on every display ratio, but oh well. If I told an experienced web dev the sheer number of hours I spent on this project, he would probably laugh in my face. I am still proud of it, because it was more of a learning process than a creation process. And this way I have something that resembles a working result, although not many more than three people looked at it so far, and being a static site I wouldn’t say it is a product. But it is online at least. This gave me a little boost in my path to a career, and a sense of achievement, if small. After seeing my site, one of my university friends asked me to create a better design for his project, further deepening my UI design skills. I hope I can work on more serious projects in the near future.
I also hope that a few years down the line I will look back at my current English speaking skills and smile. Thankfully I get much more practice now that I’m surrounded with people from around the globe. I believe I can improve my speaking without explicitly paying attention.
Have you ever built a website? Or do you have your own now? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

Comments

  1. Veikka21 February 2025 at 04:48

    Sounds like an incredible journey! It's great how you tackled the challenges and kept pushing forward. Projects aren't always sunshine and rainbows, but that's what makes them remarkable. Thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
  2. FalpPuction21 February 2025 at 07:05

    Interesting journey you've had. I'm a little jealous about your skills, because I have no experience of building a website. Nightwish also happens to be one of my favourite bands too.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Just A Chill Hooman21 February 2025 at 12:41

    It's inspiring how you chose the challenging path of learning HTML and CSS from scratch instead of using website builders. This struggle with CSS text overlay shows real dedication to understanding the fundamentals. Keep moving...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Snow21 February 2025 at 13:14

    Wow that sounds like a very teaching journey you had there. It's funny how much I can relate to picking up an old project only to realise I have no recollection of what I was doing and how I did it hahaha. Wonderful to hear that you were able to push through that initial confusion and learn while making the website. Amazing perseverance!

    ReplyDelete
  5. L23 February 2025 at 08:00

    This was such a relatable and fun read, your journey from a high school project to building your own personal site really captures the essence of learning web dev. Good luck.

    ReplyDelete

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