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, an 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. Today 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!