After teaching myself HTML, Photoshop and FTP, and experimenting with my own pages on the early Web, I started jobhunting. After answering 10 adverts in The Guardian without success, I saw a tiny advert for a web developer in  the Evening Standard. It did not look particularly interesting, but a friend persuaded me to try anyway. When I arrived at the company, I discovered that they had recently paid for a website to be designed but could not get it working properly on their PCs. I looked at it and immediately saw the problem: they were using Internet Explorer 2, which did not support frames. I downloaded Internet Explorer 3, which solved the problem, and they were so impressed that they asked me what salary I wanted. The advert had offered £16,000. I suggested £20,000. They laughed and offered £18,000. I replied with £18,500, and they agreed. That was how I became a professional web developer.

The company was a small Chelsea Wharf start-up, calling themselves the Garrick Corporation. The atmosphere was energetic and sometimes chaotic. Everyone suddenly wanted a website. Technical people were discovering what was possible, while salespeople were discovering that companies would pay for websites even if they did not fully understand what they were buying. Some of the sites were very simple. We were sometimes building websites for around £150, and at the peak we could produce three or four small websites in a day. Looking back, it seems extraordinary how quickly the industry moved from hobbyists creating pages at home to companies selling web development as a commercial service.

Among the projects I worked on were Brighter Pictures and Harkness Sayers, both movie business production companies. These were still hand-built websites, created before content management systems became common. Pages were designed individually, graphics were created in Photoshop and everything was uploaded manually using FTP.

I preferred manually coding HTML, which gave cleaner code, but for big projects or tricky configuration, I sometimes used DreamWeaver or HotMetal Pro. Graphics were created in Photoshop, while the finished pages were uploaded one by one using FTP. There were no content management systems, no templates (other than those I made) and no drag-and-drop website builders. Every page was built by hand.

The National Trust project was probably the biggest website I worked on at that stage. They already had a small website, but they had not attempted to put their properties online in any systematic way. They had around 300 sites across Britain, and my task was to create a separate page for each one, including photographs and information. The photographs arrived in a large envelope, and I scanned them all myself before building the pages.

It is difficult to imagine now how manual this process was. There were no modern image libraries or automated publishing systems. Each page was created, checked and uploaded individually. Most of the websites we built were uploaded, initially to Demon, but later to Nildram-hosted space, for example:

garrick.com/HarnkessSayers

but the National Trust site was hosted on its own domain.

Nildram at this time was only a father-and-son setup in a house, and one hilarious moment occurred when I called them up to fix an issue on their server.

“Fine!” was the reply. “But we’re watching football, so we need to wheel the servers into the lounge, so we can eat pizza, drink beer and watch the football while we fix it.”

They fixed it pretty quickly.

We also started using tools such as WebTrends to understand how people were using websites. Analytics were still very basic compared with today, but it was the beginning of the idea that websites were not just things you built and left alone; they were things you could measure and improve.

This was also the period when the Web started moving beyond being just an information service and into something commercial. I remember my first attempt at making an online payment. It was not PayPal, which did not exist yet, but some early online banking or payment system. The transaction took around an hour and eventually failed. At the time it felt like a glimpse of the future, even if the future was not quite ready yet.

Another vivid memory from this period was watching NASA’s Pathfinder mission land on Mars in 1997. Because I was trusted to work independently, I was able to watch the online feed of the landing while continuing with my work. It was an extraordinary moment: sitting at my desk, connected through this new global network, watching a spacecraft arrive on another planet.

Towards the end of this period I also worked on the UK Online Movie Database. This was another sign that the Web was beginning to move beyond simple company brochure sites and towards searchable collections of information. The idea that people could use the Internet to access large databases of information was still relatively new, but it was clearly where things were heading.

The database backend was developed by Virtual Internet (VI) in their London offices, using a Linux -Debian hosted Oracle database and connecting software developed in C++, later, Java. I remember visiting their office, and being allowed to peep through a door at the Java developers, sitting in darkness, listening to very loud metal music. Our web front end sat on early Microsoft Internet Information Servers (IIS) and used some tricky code developed by Nildram to display movie showreels of about 5 minutes in length and the option of a 4-inch wide clip at 10 Mb or a 2-inch wide clip at 5Mb, pushing the boundaries of what could be done before streaming. 

VI’s Java developers inspired me to try my hand at Java. I tried Sun’s own Java Nature Trail, but got lost! So I bought Laura Lemay’s ‘Learn Java in 21 Days,’ which indeed I managed, but Day 12 took 12 hours and hurt my head like hell.

VI and Nildram later became very big companies, with VI contributing a great deal in discussions with an organising body of the Web called the W3C.

The disparity between what sales people imagined and what could actually be done was highlighted when Micky, one of the directors, told me to be in the office at 7 am, when he called up somebody in the Microsoft labs, passed the receiver to me and whispered:
“Work out with them how to activate a printer remotely using voice only.”
The lab technician simply said:
“How did you get this number? This isn’t even public knowledge yet!”
How Micky got the number, I never found out, but he was a salesman and very charming over the telephone when he wanted to be.

Another amusing incident happened on my birthday. Two of the female staff members vanished into a tiny kitchenette and didn’t come out for hours. I heard chatter about a stripogram sometimes from male staff members, so I became convinced they had booked one. But as the afternoon hours ticked by, I became increasingly anxious, wondering what sort of stripogram was I in for? When the ladies emerged, they were carrying a huge birthday cake they had baked themselves!

Sadly, imdb.com soon filled the space our own Online Movie Database was attempting to fill, but much more efficiently, if less colourfully.

Looking back, this was the period when the Web stopped being something I experimented with in my spare time and became the foundation of my career. I had entered the industry almost by accident, but I was now part of a rapidly changing world where every project seemed to involve discovering something for the first time.

You can always find a full index of all the articles on the page under About me in the main menu.

Web Stories

In 1997, interest in virtual worlds really took off. These three stories of mine illustrate this:

In America, an art gallery, concerned about the effect light and visitors’ hands were having on their exhibitions, chose to close for one day each month and instead offer time steering a dirigible (in this case, a miniature airship equipped with a mini camera connected to the web) around the galleries. I’m sure there would have been plenty of crashes, but I never found out, because I tried to book a slot but never succeeded.

I also took part in a Virtual Reality art installation at the ICA gallery in London. We were issued with very heavy headsets and let loose in a large space, equipped with guide ropes around a course and a few very short flights of steps. While on the headset you saw fields, rivers and butterflies crudely displayed, attendants constantly grabbed your elbows and steered you away from other visitors or the walls!

I also signed up for a free virtual world, precursor to Second World, on the Web. It was simple, but you could ‘buy’ a house and find a place of work or recreation. I remember sitting on my sofa in my virtual house and watching numerous ‘stray’ avatars enter, sit down for a few moments, and then leave! These were avatars of account holders who had unsubscribed, leaving their avatars to wander randomly forever! I found it slightly unsettling!