In 2013-2014 I took an elective web design class in high school. We covered using Wordpress and Drupal as a site admin. We might have looked at the structure of a basic HTML page for an hour, but that was about it.

I had a higher appetite for web design, so I completed HTML and CSS modules on Codecademy.

The first venue where I wanted to apply my newfound knowledge was not a personal website, but the website of a climbing gym I frequented in Leuven (it doesn’t exist anymore, unfortunately): they were still using a non-responsive Flash website from the 2000’s that looked increasingly weird by 2014’s standards.

I first made a mock-up in GIMP, later a single .html page proof of concept in GitHub Atom (it still renders fine today!), and showed it to the gym’s managers, spontaneously volunteering to rebuild their website. They graciously declined (understandably), but it was still a fun first front-end web development experience.