20 Years of MOBW! Find my thoughts on this in the Flashback and the visual development of my website in the Gallery.
FLASHBACK GALLERYFLASHBACK
It's almost unreal how fast time flies by. On June 9 of 2003 my homepage went online. At that time I was 18 years old, it was the year I graduated from high school and it was an exceptional summer. When my friends and I weren't slogging for our graduation exams, we'd be somewhere outside having fun. Or simply study for the exams right at the lake. Well, in-between going for a swim and eating ice-cream, of course. Indeed, 2003 was a great year!
Why I brought this website to life back then? I don't really remember. I know I was curious about how to do such a thing. And I liked the idea of having a small, personal spot on the internet where I can present myself. Where I can be creative. Another motivation certainly was to offer my friends a platform where they could have fun and be entertained. And - just as important - where they could always find me if needed, now that school was about to end and everybody, sooner or later, would go their own way in the world. Virtual social networks like Facebook hadn't been invented yet and it was rather unusual to have your own website as a private person.
Anyhow, I wanted a homepage and I wanted it quickly. It should be diverse and offer new contents on a regular basis. Thus, I needed a program that would help me bring such a project to life without further foreknowledge, as I didn't have any clue of website programming by that time. A friend of mine told me about Frontpage. And back then, it was just the right tool for my purposes, so I sat down one day to piece a website together with it. "What you see is what you get", the program promised me... way to go!
One or two years later - with my knowledge of HTML, CSS & Co. constantly growing - I suddenly became aware of the awful source code that Frontpage had automatically patched together for me over time. But in the end, that's how I learned to do it better. How to code on my own. And by the time I started my study of graphic design a few years later, Frontpage was history anyway.
But let's go back to the start. I pottered, tested, pottered, cursed, tested, and finally it was ready, the very first version of my website! After that I searched the internet for providers of free webspace, guestbooks and web counters. For starters I was fine with a subdomain as a web address. I didn't wanna pay for a real .de domain as long as I had no clue whether anyone would actually visit my homepage at all. So my site's first address turned out to be myownbigworld.de.vu (and changed later to myownbigworld.npx.de).
June 9th of 2003 it was all set: My own, big world was ready for upload. Man, was I proud back then! But the greatest thing was: Only a few weeks after the launch, the amount of visitors would already start to increase continuously. And along with it, so did the contents of the website.
I invented new categories to keep my visitors entertained. Therefore, in 2004, sections like "Opinion Poll" and "Your World" came to life, in which visitors were able to take an active part. Also fun sections like "Operation W.I.N.T.E.R" went online for a while. Futhermore, the English version of the website was added in 2004. Especially the continuous translation of all contents into English would consume an enormous amout of time, and thus the work effort for some sections increased significantly in the long run. As a result, in the end of 2007, I decided to shut down My Own Big World. There simply wasn't enough time to keep the constant update process and site maintenance going to that extent. But it wasn't to be a Goodbye forever. I changed my mind. I didn't want my website - in which I had invested so much blood and sweat - to sink into obscurity without a peep.
So after a pause of several months, My Own Big World reported back with a relaunch in 2008. However, some sections like "Opinion Poll" and "Your World" were abandoned later due to ultimately lacking user input. Other sections were partially restructured or merged. The website got tightened in its content, more compact in its layout and, at the same time, lighter in its design.
Since 2009 the page has its own .de domain. The creative core and multimedia contents are continuing to grow and working on the website has again come to be as much fun as on the very first day. The so far collected coding experience surely is a crucial reason for it.
It's been 15 years now since my website went online. I can hardly believe it. It's nice to see how it has evolved ever since. Along with me, My Own Big World has grown up. Become more serious. More confident. More well-defined. But just like me, it won't lose its childlike side either. It will continue to be playful. Curious. Defiant. Contents, design and programming will continue to evolve.
Today this website is the flagship for my creative work. It's the bowl for my mind salad. The room for new ideas and figments. It has become important for my professional life. And at the same time it remains a meeting spot for all friends and acquaintances, from all over the world.
It is my own big world. And I hope that all of you keep the desire to spend time in it in the future as well. My sincere gratitude goes out to all my visitors. Thanks for every compliment, for every constructive criticism, for every feedback. And for every visitor that is yet to come.
Sincerely yours,
Julian