I became interested in computer when I used to go to work with my grandmother. She was a secretary at a milling company, called Gramco. I used to sit on her lap and play Mindsweeper on Windows 95. Also there was some other interesting game that I played (can’t remember what it was).
I became interested in the Web ever since my Grandma got AOL and let me play around with it. It was dial-up, but who cared? It was the biggest thing then. Even then I was trying to figure out how to create a Website. The day I discovered the “Save as Webpage” in Microsoft Word, was the day I really got into Web creation. That day was in the summer of 2006. That was almost ten years after I discovered a computer. At the time I was doing making a letter or something on Word. So my first Website I created was with Microsoft Word. The Website was for mothers business, Thurn Bird Originals. Unfortunately, the site never came out as she sold the business in 2007. Maybe one of these days I will put it Online as it was when I stopped working on it.
In about June of 2007 I came up with an idea of the Little Valley Area Chamber of Commerce having a Website. Since my mother is the Vice President, I let her in on my idea. She agreed. In about a couple of weeks I had met with the other directors of the Chamber of Commerce, and it was a go. Throughout the summer, I created the site using Microsoft Word. I never fully completed the site until February. So one night, I registered the Yahoo Hosting account we were going to use. Then I uploaded all of the files to the server. And there, the the first Little Valley Area Chamber of Commerce Website was Online February 28th, 2008. The site had many flaws and didn’t work exactly as expected.
I kept up the site using Microsoft Word by deleting all the files on the server and re-uploading all of them. Then a friend of mine gave me a copy of Microsoft Office 2003. The suit had a program I was unfamiliar with at the time called, Publisher. I quickly discovered that you could save a document as a PDF. Therefore, I created the entire document using one file. That created one large file. The second version went Online in about May 2008. The site was the slowest site I ever saw. It was like using dial-up on a high speed connection. I later discovered that when Internet Explore 8 came out in BETA, that the most important navigation tool didn’t work, the sidebar.
At that time, I became so depressed about the site not displaying right and everything being so slow that I gave up on the Website. It was about a month since I touched it. When December 1st hit I only wanted to update its graphics as it got custom graphics around holidays. I put a Christmas graphic on it and didn’t even bother changing any other bugs or creating more pages. One night early in December I was playing around with the Hosting account on Yahoo and discovered Yahoo’s own site builder, Yahoo Site Builder. So I said, “what the heck,” and downloaded it.
Yahoo Site builder had nothing to wow me with. The UI was pretty dull and boring with some confusing buttons. The templates were not all that great. So picked one out anyway. I began to play around with it, and within two and a half weeks I had created a brand-new Website. I decided that I would change it on New Year’s Eve to ring in the new year with something new. So the new site was live December 31st at approximately 9 o’clock at night.
