The Story of Greylizard Webdesign
It all started in 1977, I think. It was certainly the late 70s. I was 7. I was allowed to go to my mum’s work, on accountants where she was a secretary. It was a small firm and the boss was happy for me to go there. It was an introduction to office working life for me. I would be very interested in the typewriters, photocopier and filing cabinates. Anyway, in ‘77 they got this new thing called a “computer”. This wacky machine stood in the bosses office and when one of the young men who worked there, now a “computer expert” sat with me, we would go on this machine and play “pong”.
Here started a long obsession with “computers”. The machine was an Apple II. It worked with 5 inch floppy disks and had a green screen monitor. The Apple II had NO SMALL CAPS! So one did a lot of shouting on there, in green letters. Soon the Apple was moved to its own room and gradually had accounting software put on it. Computers were not a primary office machine then and the Apple often stood idle, or would have done, if I hadn’t taken the idle time.
The Apple ran on basic software, there were no graphic interfaces then. You had to type commands to investigate the floppy disk and start programs. If you typed “run” the program would start, if you typed “load” it would call up the basic behind the program. So I realised straight away what made the programs tick. I had no manuals, I just slowly pieced together how to make a basic program and slowly is the operative word. Of course, most of the programs I had were games. These were the days when you bought a book with several basic programs code listed in them and you typed them out on your computer, and hey presto! you had a new game. Or, often you didn’t as one typo meant it crashed. You then went though the code again to find the typos, and hey presto! you had a game. I do remember one of these books of games was by Microsoft and Bill Gates, there was a picture of a young lad with long hair in jeans on a chopper bicycle.
So I started to make my own software. Games were beyond my ability and almost all of my software was human interface software. Who’s have thought I was making websites in the 70s? Long before the internet. In-fact, I didn’t get my computer connected to others until the late 90s. Computers were lonely geek things then. Over time at my mum’s work they upgraded to an Apple IIe and an Apple IIc. These Apples did lower caps! But they still ran on 5 inch floppy disks. They all had green screen monitors but the IIc was a compact machine with a small monitor. When they got PCs they put the two Apples in a junk room. More of that later.
Because I had taken to “computers” at my mum’s work, when the home computer market kicked off my family got me a Sinclair Spectrum for Xmas. I was a big gift for me, way more than I usually got. They insisted that it had to be educational. No problem, the educational software was quite fun. The Spectrum, running on basic, meant it wasn’t long before I started programming it. It wasn’t as handy as the Apple with it’s floppy disks, saving my software to magnetic tape cassettes. The Spectrum was heavy on the games but I gravitated to the puzzle and technical ones. An F15 Eagle flight simulator being a favourite. I spent far too much time on the Apples and the Spectrum. Hours wasted… not not, tricky subject that. The Spectrum got upgraded with more memory and a proper keyboard. The original Spectrum keyboard was small and of rubberised keys.
I had never been taught computers at school. I was entirely self taught. At school they had BBC micros, a computer I hated. I hardly got to touch one as they said “my maths wasn’t good enough”. When I went to sixth form I did an O-level in computers, but all of it was based on knowledge I already had.
My mum’s work then went PC. They had Apricots and Olivetti PCs. I started my first job and they took me on because I knew computers. They had Apricot PCs. I programmed these in my lunch break in GW Basic and MS Dos. These PCs had harddrives, luxury! My job was as a draughtsman using AutoCAD to make circuit diagrams for factory electrics. The point being, the drawing was computer generated and a human interface, presentation was important to make the diagram understandable.
My next job was in desktop publishing. These were Apple Mac 2 computers running Quark Express and Photoshop. I made magazine pages, pictures and graphics for the magazines and newspapers. I got this job because I “knew computers”. In this job I learnt a lot about colour presentation, layout, pictures, graphics and Photoshop. Again, largely self-taught, learning on the job. The Apple Mac was a graphic interface like windows and programming them was a non-starter. It was during my years in publishing that I became to detest Apple. Such as shame as the Apple II was great, the Mac, I don’t like. However, publishing was again a human interface product. I left the first job in publishing in 1994 to go around the world. It didn’t quite work as I expected. I got as far as India.
Meanwhile at home I got a second hand Amiga 500plus in 1990. I also got the pick of the Apples that were sitting in the junk room at my mum’s work. Unfortunately I blew up the IIe and ended up with the IIc, which I didn’t like all that much. After the Amiga 500plus I got a new Amiga 1200. I also got several old PCs from my mum’s work. All this gave me much experience in different platforms and software. I upgraded the Amiga 1200 a lot, I then blew it up. The replacement was an Amiga 2000. This was so I could install lots of cards and upgrades. Both the 1200 and the 2000 were able to get on the internet, though badly. From the Amiga I did make my first website. This was simple HTML code. This was 1998.
In 1999 I got another job in publishing in Norwich. I then bought a second hand PC running Windows 95. With this I made websites in Netscape Composer. This was an option in the Netscape browser to make websites “What you see is what you get” (wysiwyg). Between the jobs I had met a lady in Thetford who was making websites using PCs and Microsoft Frontpage. I therefore thought that wysiwyg website builders were the way to go. I wasn’t wrong but Netscape Composer was a headache, though free, and Frontpage was expensive. They both added loads of junk to the HTML code. Not good. I learnt to code in HTML because I had to, but I liked it, so, no problem. Later I got Dreamweaver, which is also a wysiwyg editor.
I spent a lot of time making websites this way. Mostly Netscape and HTML. Dreamweaver wasn’t all that great, though it coded the HTML way better. I used it for quite sometime and started to use PHP which is advanced code in HTML. This way I was able to make more sophisticated websites. Dreamweaver was expensive but my work in Norwich bought me it as the boss wanted me to build their website.
So by 2011 I was making websites a lot. All on a PC. I started in the early days just saying to people I’d do them a free website. Then gradually people started to pay me. In 2011 my job in publishing ended. The company called for voluntary redundancies and I decided to go. I wanted to travel to Asia and South America to “save the planet”. I tried this. Long story short, I came home again after a few years.
While away I was asked to make websites. At one point I was making websites in India for Indians. When I got home I still made websites for them. Usually people outsource to India, not Indians outsourcing to UK webdesigners! Abroad I was using a laptop PC running Dreamweaver and Photoshop. I still use a laptop PC running Windows 10.
However, during this time WordPress was gaining in ability as a web platform. Gradually I switched to WordPress. If you don’t know, WordPress is CMS software (Content Management System) that sits on the webserver and vends the pages you make in it online to the web. It is basically Dreamweaver but sitting on the web host. So, I wasn’t wrong, wysiwyg was the way to go after all. However, knowing the HTML, PHP and CSS that make it all work in important. Netscape onwards gave me that knowledge as you so often had to tweak the HTML… and you still do in WordPress. The advantage is that a customer can also go into WordPress and change their pages. It’s no harder than Word for simple page editing. I means you are not dependant on one PC to make the pages on and upload to the internet, as the pages are up there already.
So, it has been a long journey. And, a lot of time “wasted” on computers, or not, making functional websites is very much worth the effort and “waste” of time!
