The Humble Origin of an Online Superhero!

For me, the Internet came into being rather quietly.

The hype engine about the World Wide Web didn't begin until long after I was well aware of it all.

And even then it was no big deal.

Text on pages, yay, big woop. What use is that?

Web pages started popping up all over the place, and just once in a while I'd find something of use, like information about my favorite video games, or maybe some news here and there I hadn't already heard on television. But otherwise the Internet failed to excite me.

Now a few years later, my broadband connection acts as an umbilical cord. Everything from my career to my love life are online, on a phosphorescent screen inches from my face at all times.

The transformation began in a library, where a friend of mine was showing off his website. Like any other page out there, it was a block of text with some randomly colored background. Not a lot to write home about in terms of presentation. But the idea behind the page was gold - as an aspiring writer, he was posting his manuscripts online to be read and reviewed by the adoring public. There were tons of these independent writers out there, too. They had all learned the basics of HTML - the simple coding language used in web pages - and used their access to the Internet to grow an audience. No one really had the time to make these pages really look good. They were writers, not decorators. But at the very least they were using the Internet for something productive, something creative, and something worthwhile.

My insatiable curiosity drove me to delve into HTML. I wanted to know how hard it really was to make something that wasn't an eyesore. My natural pickiness about color and design played a large part there, and I wanted to be able to show myself and everyone else, how it's done. I wasn't much of a writer though, and I had little to put up for content on my site, so I turned to my writer friends. With their permission I started compiling their stories online into one place. Soon enough, I had gotten the hang of e-publishing long before I even heard of it. People from all over discovered my little site and began e-mailing me, submitting their own stories to be published. I HAD STUMBLED INTO SOMETHING BIG !

The site itself was simple, and I was still learning. As I got more advanced in my web design skills, the site began to look better and better. It wasn't much compared to the official site of any given corporation, but it was pretty darn good for a one man operation. I was doing it all in plain text HTML. I had the code memorized. I knew all there was to know, as far as I was concerned. Whoever created those graphic-rich, JavaScript-driven corporate sites were either gods with insane typing speeds, or I was missing out on something. I had to find out what.

So, after I graduated from high school, I turned my sights on the only place I knew of that could show me the secrets behind this art of web design. They offered courses in industry standard software, which I knew I needed to learn. Notepad and Paint weren't going to take me much further. So I bit the bullet, took on a student loan, and began the first professional step towards my career. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I knew I'd have to do my best and learn everything I could while I was there.

After an introduction to Windows, the course turned towards some standard office programs. Create newsletters in a word processor. Make a slideshow. Administer a database. It all seemed so distant from what I was there for. And it was all so easy, as well. I learn new things quickly, so the pace of the course seemed painfully slow. Within weeks I had all the knowledge I needed to be a secretary. Luckily all that HTML work I'd done previously gave me a monumental sense of patience. I just had to survive this until they brought out the big guns, those industry-standard programs, whatever they were...

Next came graphic design. The computers at school were equipped with our new course material, and my jaw dropped. My first impression of this industry-standard software was that it looked a lot like Paint, but on steroids. With patience I could do anything, make anything. It was amazing. Breezing through this portion of the course I learned how to make all those images used in web pages; the navigation bars and logos, with chrome effects, glass effects, transparencies, layers, motion blurs, reflections, lens flares, hue shifts; anything I could come up with. It wasn't web design yet, but I knew already this graphic work would be a large part of it. Not like all those office programs which for me, had redefined tedium.

Finally at class one day there it was on the whiteboard..."Introduction to Web Design." I quickly scoured my workstation for any new software that had been installed for the course, but couldn't find anything. The instructor arrived and asked us to open Notepad. That's when things got boring again. I knew all this, the HTML, making links and colors and fonts. I even had a fair understanding of Stylesheets, and had earned a lot of extra credit showing it off. I spent a lot of time going ahead in the material, researching more advanced code and playing around. Nothing we had been taught in the course was looking nearly as good as those corporate sites just yet. The course was coming into its final sections, and I was starting to get worried. We had finally got into actual web design, but it was still nothing more than the hand-coding I had known all along...

But then, this titan of a program came up on my screen, and from a glance at the toolbars and through the menus it all began to make sense. This final program was the center of it all. I was able to type up web pages in a word processor, with all the fonts and colors I wanted, and this program would silently write the actual HTML for me. I could make an image in that high-end graphics program, and drop it right onto the web page! I could even use those databases from our office programs to create dynamic pages. I didn't have to mess with the code.

Suddenly it was as if I gained a Godly typing speed. With this, I could make complex pages, with tons and tons of code that would have taken me forever to type in Notepad. I had complete control over Stylesheets, JavaScript, and multimedia, all from this one program.

It's not that I couldn't have made these pages in Notepad, but this program made it so much faster. I could concentrate on the actual content of the page, and spend less time trying to make it look half decent. I gave my e-publishing site a major overhaul while I learned this new program, and it was more than enough to get instant recognition for the site. More writers flocked to it than ever, now that it looked like one of those nice, shiny corporate sites.

Once the course ended, the head of the school himself showed me to the next step in my career, Jeni Mayer and ProWrite Communications. I surfed around her sites, looked over the client sites and the Body Mind Spirit Magazine. It was all a great idea, with lots of interesting content. As far as design goes, however... it looked like a Notepad-and-Paint venture. So I cracked my knuckles, loaded up my new programs, and introduced myself. The rest, like my e-publishing site, is a constantly growing, constantly learning work in progress.

By Jay Baron