12 years ago was 1998, not prehistory. i was designing web sites even before. maybe some of us was also programming in the 80's, so we didn't find it difficult at all to conjure some html, some perl or php and some web graphic. web design didn't start with your cracked copies of dreamweaver and photoshop, childrens.
Topo - 14 years ago
1996 was my first year. Worked for Corel with "Web Design Suite" HTML, Java & 3D interfaces in VRML. Then changed to Notepad until Golive CyberStudio 1.
I´m not in my 30's, as some assumed.
:´-(
20% is believable... we youngsters had to learn somewhere :) I started back in 2000 as a hobby, but didn't start *professionally* working until 2004 at the end of college. I can't believe I am at 6yrs, it still feels like yesterday I was screwing around with a css sheet trying to get my paddings right, oh wait, it was ;-)
For those people spazzing about the 20%, but to be fair, that's 20% of this readership, not of all designers. And those numbers may change as time goes on.
That said, I've been doing this professionally for 10 years. I rarely meet people that can say the same. Nice to see a bunch of old-timers here.
I'm also one of the old farts. I did my first commercial web pages in 1995 for local garbage company. Haha, those were days. :D 14.4 kb/s modems, HD discs, Syquest-drives on Mac... Most of the graphics were optimized for 256 colors with Debabelizer, default resoluition was max 800 x 600, I think we did first pages optimized for 640 x 480 pixels. Of course all design was done with tables and sliced images. I must be doing something wrong because I'm still doing this, but it's much easier now. At least mostly.
I'm one of the old folk at 41, started designing seriously in 1997, a bit late to the game, though I'd been noodling with the web in 1994. ACK to spacer gifs and table layouts and thinking that CSS was only good for changing the font.
Worst memory - designing a university writing site that used notebook paper as the background. Without CSS. IE and Netscape rendered the background differently with Netscape starting the background over from the "top" of the image in every fricking cell. I think I wound up with a dozen or more slices so it would stay consistent across all browsers. When I think how easy that would be now ....
I also remember putting my website on a disk as backup - because the "floating computers" that profs could request could not always connect to the internet. At least if I had it on disk (3.5", not CD, not USB stick), I could still show my students what they needed.
Glad to see so many of us have been developing for 10+ years, debunking the first commentors theories. Loved the reference about spacer gifs and tables...old school! The pool of hobby developers (many of us started out doing this as a hobby) seems to be shrinking though, with sites like facebook or cms options like wordpress. Almost anyone can throw a site together without knowing any real code nowadays. Yet they claim to be developers, kinda sad...
Marko - 14 years ago
Vote 12+, building websites and apps since 1994, gone professional (as in hired by agencies) in 2000. I'm actualy surpriced only 20% are doing it that long.
@Alex: some of us were in the industry before you knew what internet was, when people were calling us geeks for using emails, before PHP or MySQL even existed and stuff was coded in Perl and flat databases, ...
I read "HTML for Dummies" in 1996 and built my first web site that year. We're celebrating our 14th birthday as a web design agency this November - and yes, that makes me feel old!
my first web design was on 2005, and never really serious about it till end of 2008 when i got job as web developer on local college. I only have 2 years experience as professional in this field.
Jessica Lares - 14 years ago
Yeah, I started graphic design with MacPaint when I was two, then Paintbrush in the Windows 3.1 era. Web design like when I was 7, first .com at 8. I'm 21 now.
I started software developing with Amstrad and moved on to design and development as well as teaching, started my business in 1998 after creating a website for my employer and International Camp in Mersea. Haven't looked back since and love to learn new things every day, it is what gets me up in the morning.
I made by first website back in '95 when I was about 12. It was horrendous! Fortunately, the demise of Geocities has removed this pollution from the web.
Michael Price - 14 years ago
Voted 12+ years myself. I'm 28 and built and launched my first website when I was 14. I've gotten a lot better at it in the intervening years, and made a career out of it :)
Michael - 14 years ago
When I was 12 (in 1999) I bought a book about "the internet" which had a chapter or two on html. Between 12 and 14 I made a few Angelfire / Geocities sites and even included some Javascript. I had a disclaimer - best viewed in Internet Explorer at a resolution of 800x600. I wasn't really interested in it again until I was 18 and have been working in the industry from age 19-23.
Marloes - 14 years ago
I've 25, been doing this over 11 years now, of which 7 years professionally. I don't think it's unbelievable that people are doing this for over 12 years.
I remember putting my website on a floppy disk, going to school and uploading it on the internet there, because I only could go on the internet at home in the weekends.
I think the poll result is just saying - for how many years most smashing magazine readers are web developing. Its not the stat for webdevlopers in the world context. So, its no wonder that there are so many experienced webdevs.
Eric - 14 years ago
We thought we were so cool because when we recruited on campus we handed interviewees an About Us website...on a floppy disk! (Actually, it was pretty radical, given the scarcity of Internet connections in the mid-90s.)
Mesanotusa - 14 years ago
I studied html and built my first sites on a Amiga 3000 in 1995. HTML 2.0... great times!
Violetlobster - 14 years ago
Yes, me too. Built my first corporate website in about 1995/6 (hand scripted with state-of-the-art table layouts!) and made the animated GIFs frame by frame. IIRC, Netscape was trouncing IE, and HotMetal was causing a stir by offering wysiwyg HTML editing for the graphic designers
I remember browsing the web for the first time with a graphical browser (as opposed to Lynx). It was painful though. Mosaic wouldn't run for more than a few minutes without crashing. Then later that same year, in October i believe, Netscape 0.9 beta was released. Gray backgrounds. Blue links. I've been designing websites ever since. So that's what, 15 years?
1px transparent spacer GIF + tables.... ah, happy days
Nora - 14 years ago
I've made websites in many different ways and using many different tools. I took my first HTML class in the mid 90s and published my first personal site in 1998. It's totally possible. :)
I totally have to agree with my successors, i'm not a Professional Web Dev, but i started getting into HTML and Web Technology really early, almost 15 years ago as well (Christ im old!), i still remember using my first line of CSS and getting totally exited over it as well as the times when using the first ICQ was really expensive cause connections we're still charged by the minute.
You young cats ain't got no idea ;) *hehe
Dawn - 14 years ago
Having been in the industry for over 15 years (yes, back in the early years of Mosaic pre-Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, back when the default browser background color was gray and no one knew what they were doing). I would actually think that 20% or higher for 12+ years experience is very accurate. This is not a new field.
Mal - 14 years ago
@Alex Most of the the web developers/designers I know have around ten years commercial experience, with perhaps a few additional years where they built hobby websites or did projects for uni.
Breklin - 14 years ago
@Alex: Is it not possible that 20% of respondents are in the mid-30s and have been doing this for 12+ years? I think it's entirely possible just because you are a relative noob does not make the statistic a FAIL.
Alex - 14 years ago
I find it hard to believe that 20% has been designing for over 12 years. I think some people are forgetting that the polls are anonymous. Or they're just trying to screw up the results. I myself have been designing for just over 3 years now.
12 years ago was 1998, not prehistory. i was designing web sites even before. maybe some of us was also programming in the 80's, so we didn't find it difficult at all to conjure some html, some perl or php and some web graphic. web design didn't start with your cracked copies of dreamweaver and photoshop, childrens.
1996 was my first year. Worked for Corel with "Web Design Suite" HTML, Java & 3D interfaces in VRML. Then changed to Notepad until Golive CyberStudio 1.
I´m not in my 30's, as some assumed.
:´-(
Go & keep learnin'
20% is believable... we youngsters had to learn somewhere :) I started back in 2000 as a hobby, but didn't start *professionally* working until 2004 at the end of college. I can't believe I am at 6yrs, it still feels like yesterday I was screwing around with a css sheet trying to get my paddings right, oh wait, it was ;-)
For those people spazzing about the 20%, but to be fair, that's 20% of this readership, not of all designers. And those numbers may change as time goes on.
That said, I've been doing this professionally for 10 years. I rarely meet people that can say the same. Nice to see a bunch of old-timers here.
I'm also one of the old farts. I did my first commercial web pages in 1995 for local garbage company. Haha, those were days. :D 14.4 kb/s modems, HD discs, Syquest-drives on Mac... Most of the graphics were optimized for 256 colors with Debabelizer, default resoluition was max 800 x 600, I think we did first pages optimized for 640 x 480 pixels. Of course all design was done with tables and sliced images. I must be doing something wrong because I'm still doing this, but it's much easier now. At least mostly.
I'm one of the old folk at 41, started designing seriously in 1997, a bit late to the game, though I'd been noodling with the web in 1994. ACK to spacer gifs and table layouts and thinking that CSS was only good for changing the font.
Worst memory - designing a university writing site that used notebook paper as the background. Without CSS. IE and Netscape rendered the background differently with Netscape starting the background over from the "top" of the image in every fricking cell. I think I wound up with a dozen or more slices so it would stay consistent across all browsers. When I think how easy that would be now ....
I also remember putting my website on a disk as backup - because the "floating computers" that profs could request could not always connect to the internet. At least if I had it on disk (3.5", not CD, not USB stick), I could still show my students what they needed.
Build my first site when I was 9 and launched first two years later, so that's 7 years for me now.
Ha Eric. Yeah I remember walking around with my homepage on a floppy. I also had the font I used in it on that floppy.
Glad to see so many of us have been developing for 10+ years, debunking the first commentors theories. Loved the reference about spacer gifs and tables...old school! The pool of hobby developers (many of us started out doing this as a hobby) seems to be shrinking though, with sites like facebook or cms options like wordpress. Almost anyone can throw a site together without knowing any real code nowadays. Yet they claim to be developers, kinda sad...
Vote 12+, building websites and apps since 1994, gone professional (as in hired by agencies) in 2000. I'm actualy surpriced only 20% are doing it that long.
@Alex: some of us were in the industry before you knew what internet was, when people were calling us geeks for using emails, before PHP or MySQL even existed and stuff was coded in Perl and flat databases, ...
I read "HTML for Dummies" in 1996 and built my first web site that year. We're celebrating our 14th birthday as a web design agency this November - and yes, that makes me feel old!
my first web design was on 2005, and never really serious about it till end of 2008 when i got job as web developer on local college. I only have 2 years experience as professional in this field.
Yeah, I started graphic design with MacPaint when I was two, then Paintbrush in the Windows 3.1 era. Web design like when I was 7, first .com at 8. I'm 21 now.
I started software developing with Amstrad and moved on to design and development as well as teaching, started my business in 1998 after creating a website for my employer and International Camp in Mersea. Haven't looked back since and love to learn new things every day, it is what gets me up in the morning.
there are a lot of designers out there... :D
I've been messing about with HTML and whatnot since I was at university, which I finished in 1998. So I'm in that 12+ years.
Now if the question was: How long have you been designing or developing websites PROFESSIONALLY, the answer would be different!
I made by first website back in '95 when I was about 12. It was horrendous! Fortunately, the demise of Geocities has removed this pollution from the web.
Voted 12+ years myself. I'm 28 and built and launched my first website when I was 14. I've gotten a lot better at it in the intervening years, and made a career out of it :)
When I was 12 (in 1999) I bought a book about "the internet" which had a chapter or two on html. Between 12 and 14 I made a few Angelfire / Geocities sites and even included some Javascript. I had a disclaimer - best viewed in Internet Explorer at a resolution of 800x600. I wasn't really interested in it again until I was 18 and have been working in the industry from age 19-23.
I've 25, been doing this over 11 years now, of which 7 years professionally. I don't think it's unbelievable that people are doing this for over 12 years.
I remember putting my website on a floppy disk, going to school and uploading it on the internet there, because I only could go on the internet at home in the weekends.
I think the poll result is just saying - for how many years most smashing magazine readers are web developing. Its not the stat for webdevlopers in the world context. So, its no wonder that there are so many experienced webdevs.
We thought we were so cool because when we recruited on campus we handed interviewees an About Us website...on a floppy disk! (Actually, it was pretty radical, given the scarcity of Internet connections in the mid-90s.)
I studied html and built my first sites on a Amiga 3000 in 1995. HTML 2.0... great times!
Yes, me too. Built my first corporate website in about 1995/6 (hand scripted with state-of-the-art table layouts!) and made the animated GIFs frame by frame. IIRC, Netscape was trouncing IE, and HotMetal was causing a stir by offering wysiwyg HTML editing for the graphic designers
I remember browsing the web for the first time with a graphical browser (as opposed to Lynx). It was painful though. Mosaic wouldn't run for more than a few minutes without crashing. Then later that same year, in October i believe, Netscape 0.9 beta was released. Gray backgrounds. Blue links. I've been designing websites ever since. So that's what, 15 years?
More than 20% for 12+ years! Unbelievable!
1px transparent spacer GIF + tables.... ah, happy days
I've made websites in many different ways and using many different tools. I took my first HTML class in the mid 90s and published my first personal site in 1998. It's totally possible. :)
I totally have to agree with my successors, i'm not a Professional Web Dev, but i started getting into HTML and Web Technology really early, almost 15 years ago as well (Christ im old!), i still remember using my first line of CSS and getting totally exited over it as well as the times when using the first ICQ was really expensive cause connections we're still charged by the minute.
You young cats ain't got no idea ;) *hehe
Having been in the industry for over 15 years (yes, back in the early years of Mosaic pre-Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, back when the default browser background color was gray and no one knew what they were doing). I would actually think that 20% or higher for 12+ years experience is very accurate. This is not a new field.
@Alex Most of the the web developers/designers I know have around ten years commercial experience, with perhaps a few additional years where they built hobby websites or did projects for uni.
@Alex: Is it not possible that 20% of respondents are in the mid-30s and have been doing this for 12+ years? I think it's entirely possible just because you are a relative noob does not make the statistic a FAIL.
I find it hard to believe that 20% has been designing for over 12 years. I think some people are forgetting that the polls are anonymous. Or they're just trying to screw up the results. I myself have been designing for just over 3 years now.