One of the first people I started talking to when I first got AOL in december of 1996 was a girl named Paige. or DragonL722 if you prefer. Amongst our Sailor Moon or Dragon Ball Z banter, her web site was brought up. As a matter of fact, it still exists, check it out here http://members.aol.com/DragonL722. I knew of web pages, but I didn't think someone like me or her could actually make one. I was rather facinated by the prospect much the same way I was facinated by legos. She used something called Personal Publisher 2 which was a web making tool free for AOL members, with a whole 2MB of free web space o_O. This was my first experience at making a web site. With every newbie site it consisted of various centered images, links, and scrolled down seemingly forever. Very soon if not immediately my site was named Flik's Homepage (I was going by the name Flik online), and I moved to Geocities from AOL. Geocities was one of the largest free web space providers on the web. The next most important thing that happened was I stumbled upon a few sites that I generally admired in terms of design. Basically I thought they looked cool, and I wanted to make a cool looking site as well. The one in particular that I really tried to model my first sites after was called Piccolo's Homepage a Dragon Ball Z fan site dedicated to the character Piccolo. It really wasnt anything that special but, I really liked the background image. The clean look. There was an animated gif at the top of the page and there wasnt that many animations on web sites back then. That site more than any other was what impired the looks of my various web sites for quite a while. Here is the background he used Piccolo Background. I still think it looks good even today. My mission now was to best his web site, at least in terms of looks. This was really what got me to start learning HTML code, the most basic programming language used in web sites. I never really moved past HTML, at least in terms of being able to write the code myself. I can use some JAVA scripts, but I can't write them. I don't dabble in flash or perl or anything like that either. But my skill in HTML, or at least my comprehension of it advanced at a steady pace. I learned it by myself at first, mainly from disecting the codes I had available and learning their function. Later I started finding HTML help sites and studying those as well. My first big breakthrough was finally understanding how to link separate pages together rather than having one long pagge. The next step forward was learning frames. Which basically lets you have more than one website showing at once. It is predominately used for creating menu's. It was around this time I met WavGirl. Or should I say she met me through some inapropriate spam e-mail advertising her site. I think I was rather vexxed or peeved when I contacted her back. But we got the talking at any rate, and we both had web sites that we worked hard one. So she was a good influence, and possibly something of a rival. I would say my early web sites almost always beat hers in terms of looks, but she had the better content that was actually entertaining. The next big breakthrough for me was getting good with tables. Basically the most important dicipline when it comes to having a web site structered the way you want it. Kind of like you see text and images in a magazines lined up in separate columns. You could consider those tables. I knew of them, but didnt know their subtleties or how to use them effectively. In fact I thought I was so could with them I was the self professed grand master table. I don't brag often, if ever. But in reality I didn't know anyone better with tables than I was, nor could I find any table set on any other website that I could not duplicate if not do better. Matter of fact the table set I have on dimipapa.com currently is the most overcomplicated one I have ever created. Though it doesn't look like much. From this point in it was just a matter of getting better with everyhing, learning a few new codes and tricks here and there. And well this process is still going on you might say. Down below you will see some examples of my work, and a little bit of my reasoning and theories for my designs. Try not to fall asleep now.