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…

I’ve recently moved all my @jek2k.com email addresses to Gmail.
I’ve been using Gmail for a while now and I’ve found it to work pretty good, so I decided to close my old-school Pop3 accounts and forward all my emails to my Gmail account. This will allow me to have one single centralized interface to read my personal emails, even when I’m travelling,
without ever worrying about web space and attachments size.

My colleague Giacomo tought me how to keep using my domain and my @jek2k.com address with Gmail, so the migration was completely painless. General information on how to do that can also be found here.

Yeah, I’ve been neglecting this blog… again… for quite a long time.
I’ve been working restlessly in the last 3 months – so many new projects – and I’ve had no time to update my own website. My MacBookPro has reached a record uptime of nearly 35 days.

Anyway, I anticipate taking some time during the Christmas holidays and making many additions to my portfolio. Also, a couple of tutorials are in the works, so stand by!

In the meantime, my best wishes of a merry Christmas and a wonderful 2008 to all of you.

In the last months I’ve been trying some social/self-expression Web2.0 services, such as Facebook or LinkedIn. In the last few days I decided to give Virb a try too.

Based on my personal experience, I’m finding Virb a good service to connect with friends, share interests and meet like-minded people.
I mean, I have very little free time to spend using social networks, so I use this kind of tools mostly to connect with people I know or people I’ve worked with, while I’m not particularly interested in online friendship/relationships. Sorry, I’m an old school guy – I prefer obsolete and analogic things like talking face to face or hanging out with real (made of bones and flash) friends.
Also, I’m interested in these services from a technical point of view, as they might be helpful to my job or useful for my clients, so I try to keep myself up-to-date.

So far Virb seems to offer a good platform for self-expression (listing your interests, hobbies, likes, publishing your blogs, your photos or your videos, etc.) and good tools to connect with friends.
It seems to me a more professional service than Facebook – or maybe it is simply less overcrowded than Facebook. Also Virb has a limited set of truly useful tools, while Facebook has potentially every kind of tools, but 90% of them are just a waste of time.

However, the feature that takes Virb on a whole different level is the ability to fully customize your profile design. As you may easily understand, this is a big plus for every designers, artists or professionals who wants to establish a strong presence in social networks. Or it’s simply a powerful way to express yourself through design instead of writing long profiles and listing hundreds of interests.

As soon as I could find some free time, I’d love to customize my Virb page.
I see a good potential in it, being a simple and effective way to collect my blog posts, my Flickr photos, my friends and my bio in one single place for anyone to visit.

Anyway, that’s just my personal opinion after trying it for a few days.
Has anyone else tried Virb? Like it? Hate it? Let me know your thoughts…

Today FreelanceSwitch, the best freelance resource out there, launched the greatly anticipated 2007 Global Freelance Survey, trying to investigate the freelance scenario, how freelancers are doing, how much they’re earning, etc.

Read the blog post or take the survey.

All participants will receive detailed report and statistics of the survey, to know more about the freelance world. Moreover they offer prizes (with random draw), including a Nintendo Wii!
So you got no excuses, just go and take the survey!

Jek2k.com made the 14th place with 56 votes and an average rating of 8.93.
Sweet!

Last Sunday (May 6th) I turned 25. And even I forgot to blog about it…

Anyway, I’ve took the time to add a little new feature to Jek2k.com.
Since the Portfolio section below was a bit outdated and have so little free time to take care of it, I thought of making it self-updating. First thing I’ve modified the RSS feed of my company’s web site. Then I’ve used the WordPress built-in Magpie RSS PHP class (thanks to this tutorial) to load that RSS feed and update the Portfolio section automatically, picking the latest 9 items of the feed.

This is going to save me a lot of time and help me maintaining two sites with ease.

Freelance Switch
Freelance Switch is a newly born blog and resource for freelancers. It has plenty of articles and guides to start freelancing or to boost up your freelance business. Very useful.

eBook: “Web Designer’s Success Guide” by Kevin Airgid
Award-winning designer Kevin Airgid shared some wisdom in his book “Web Designer’s Success Guide”. Now the book is available as a free eBook to download, so you have no excuses not to read it!

Get the free eBook here.

AIGA Salary Survey 2006
Thanks to Alessandro for letting me know about this.
AIGA, the professional association for design, has released an annual salary survey for creative jobs. It is quite interesting browsing it and finding out how much a freelance web designer like me is supposed to earn. However, it deals only with the USA market. It would be very interesting to see the results for an Italian or European survey.

Get the PDF here.

Here we go again.

Some days ago, during the Christmas holidays, AJ of Devlounge interviewed me about my background, design trends in 2006 and my latest projects.
Today the interview went live.

It is an incredible honour to be featured on Devlounge and see my interview among the others with some of the most influent designers in the world.

Should you have any questions, I’m available to answer comments (posted both here at Jek2k.com or at Devlounge) and emails.

Yesterday Jek2k.com reached 100.000 hits since June 12th, when I first released this 6th version of the site.

This goes far beyond my expectations. Thanks to everybody that featured this site, that left comments or simply visited Jek2k.com.