10 years designing websites

10 years since publishing my first website

On October 30th, 1999 I was a 17-year-old high-school student with a passion for internet, graphics and design. On that day I published my very first website.

It was a personal website, it was called Jek Web Site, Jek being my nickname, and was hosted on a incredibly poor free service (Digilander, an italian service similar to Geocities). It was built with tables, crappy markup and required me months on work using Microsoft Frontpage 2000 (yes, it’s a shame, but I wasn’t a Mac user at that time yet). Essentially it was a 4-page website about my hobbies, favourite music and videogames. I made it mostly to play around with this new internet thing.

I already knew I liked it, but definitely had no idea it would have turned out to be my fulltime job a few years later.

One year later I decided to buy a domain for my website and wanted to get jek.com. However that domain name was already registered, so, as it was year 2000, I opted for jek2k.com. Since then the domain itself has become the name of my website.

During time it went from totally personal hobby/fun site to a music-related site to Flash site to portfolio site.
In 2006, as I already had a professional website and portfolio at gnvpartners.com, I decided to turn jek2k.com into a blog and jump on the WordPress bandwagon, which was emerging as one of the most talked-about blogging platforms.

Six months later, the WordPress customization of jek2k.com had been featured on pretty much all the CSS galleries and led me to designing WordPress themes for international clients and for Matt Mullenweg, WordPress in person.

And this is the story of jek2k.com. At least of these first 10 years…