Making Websites for Fun and Profit

I’ve been designing websites since I was approximately 16. Most of them haven’t been excellent, and only four of them can still be found on the internet. The first website was made with Microsoft Publisher, which allowed publishing a visual document “as-is” to the web, accomplishing arbitrary layouts with a disastrous mess of incomprehensible markup behind-the-scenes.

Everything about making websites has changed since then! Here are the stages I remember learning…

First it was flat HTML files with all the visual touches intermingled with the document data
Then “style sheets” allowed storing visual display rules outside the main document, separating design from structure
Next came tools like Macromedia Dreamweaver that enabled generating page templates so that the same structure and design code didn’t have to be copied for each page of the website
Then I learned server-side programming using PHP, writing code that would dynamically generate each page’s content from a database
At a job I had from 2007–2013, I dabbled in two “web frameworks” that were growing rapidly in popularity: Django, then Ruby on Rails a few years later. These were the first times I learned about “MVC” (Model-View-Controller) frameworks, separating data structure (Model) from presentation/layout/design (View) from site behaviour (Controller)
… there are definitely more things that belong in this list, but I ran out of time. Oh well!