With the big name change from 37signals to Basecamp, I’ve been feeling a bit nostalgic. So I decided to go back to the beginning and dig up some old work. Thank you Wayback Machine!.
Back in 1996, I landed my first web design freelance gig. I was still in college, so this was very much a part time endeavor. I learned basic HTML by viewing source and deconstructing other sites. I knew my way around Photoshop 3 just enough to be dangerous. So it was time to do some selling.
I looked around the web for sites that I thought I could improve. My interest was in finance at the time, so I reached out to a variety of financial sites. I often sent a short email to whatever email address I could find on a given site. Usually it was [email protected].
I don’t have any of those original emails anymore, but they went something like this:
Hi there- My name is Jason. I'm a web designer in Tucson Arizona. I think your site is pretty good, but I think I can make it better. If you'd like, I'd be happy to put together a one page redesign of your home page to show you what I can do. It'll take about a week. Let me know if you're interested. Thanks! -Jason
As you might imagine, hardly anyone returned my email. But a few did. And one of those folks was Tim Knight, the owner of Prophet Information Systems.
Tim took me up on the offer, so I whipped up a quick redesign idea for him. Unfortunately I don’t have that work handy anymore, but ultimately it was good enough for him to hear me out on a complete redesign.
I pitched him a full site redesign (which I think was a few “templates” and a home page) for $600. He bought it. Tim became my first ever web design client. He was the first person to really bet on me like that. I’ll never forget that.
I can’t remember if I met with Tim in person before I delivered the first few design ideas, but we met a few times during the project. His company (which was just him) was based out in Palo Alto. So I’d find some time to head out there on the weekends in between classes. Or maybe I skipped classes, I don’t remember.
We went back and forth via email and phone and finally we landed on something we were both happy with.
So here’s the big reveal. Here’s my first ever commercial web design project from back in 1996.
The home page / splash page looked like this.
When you clicked enter, you went to a menu page. Remember when web sites had splash pages and menu pages? It was such a simpler, clearer time back then. Here’s what the menu page looked liked:
If you clicked one of the links, you’d end up on a page like this:
One of the things I really miss about that era of web design was the “links” page. Most sites back then linked up other sites that they liked or respected. It was a cool mutual admiration society back then. Companies weren’t afraid of sending their traffic elsewhere – we were all so blown away that you could actually links to other sites that we all did it so generously. Here was the links page at Prophet:
Last, one of the other things I really miss about that era was the ability to sign your work. There was often an understanding between the designer and the owner that you could have a credits page or a link at the bottom of the site showing who did the work. So here was the credits page (“Spinfree” was my freelance name):
You can actually walk through the whole site using the Wayback Machine. Here’s Prophet Information Services as it was in October of 1996.
It’s fun to look back and see where you started, who took a shot on you, how you did, and where you’ve been since. I’m so grateful that Tim saw enough of something in me to give me a chance (or maybe he just saw a cheap $600 price tag ;). Regardless, it changed everything for me.
Tim also taught me a lot about technical trading, so not only did I get $600 and my first client, but I learned a bunch too. I was a finance major, so it was fun to get some real-life exposure to technical trading. They didn’t teach this stuff in school, and Tim was a good mentor. I couldn’t ask for anything more. In the years after, I did a few more site designs for Tim at Prophet. He was a great client.
Here’s Tim today on LinkedIn. He blogs at Slope of Hope. In 2010 he wrote a book on technical trading called Chart Your Way To Profits. And to complete the small world loop, Tim has a show on TastyTrade network which is based here in Chicago. Good times.
So what about you? Who gave you your first shot? Who was your first client? Care to share some (embarrassing) early work?
Abhishek
on 11 Feb 14I had wanted to open a cafe in Bangalore. Someone suggested if I could get someone’s website developed in seven days they would pay me 800 dollars. I needed money and went to meet the guy. I managed to convince him and rushed back. I asked around how did one develop a website? I managed to find a kind soul, who not only taught me the basics, but designed and developed the website. Anil Sahoo is his name and he ran Unisoftsol ( he could sign the website then). I heard terms like HTML, Template, PSD, Graphics for the first time. I completed the website on time and felt proud of pimping around. However, I got hooked on to creating things from scratch. That’s my first web development assignment – http://web.archive.org/web/20071004205824/http://www.uei-global.com/
Adan
on 11 Feb 14I did my first (paid) webpage for a local band for a friend of mine, top to bottom.
I discovered frames so it was a mess, it had an intro and a menu done in Swish because Flash was too hard and too bare bones.
I did it for around $300, with regular updates.
Abhishek
on 11 Feb 14To add to my above comment I could never start the cafe, albeit I managed someone’s cafe for some time. I realised that I loved creating websites, campaigns and applications and have stuck to it. I am grateful to Anil for helping me. Finally I am learning to code as well.
Michael
on 11 Feb 14Nice! I didn’t know you had the finance background. My first job out of college was to analyze securities and also to build a web startup for my employer. My boss definitely took a chance on me because that’s a weird combination of skills, but it worked out.
My first freelance gig was for a political blog. I was trying to earn extra money by collecting signatures for a libertarian candidate for congress who was paying $1.00 each, and $1.25 each if you got over a thousand. I worked all week and only got something like 25. It was really poor. On the last day, I went down to a big festival in a nearby city and ran into a guy doing the same thing, except he had collected hundreds. He taught me a lot of tricks about getting people to sign and finding good locations. He had some crazy stories about collecting signatures for $6 each in hostile union territory in Detroit. It turned out he was a former employee of Ron Paul who traveled around the country getting signatures for money and then went back to Texas to run his wife’s Chinese restaurant, working on his blog the whole time.
I collected about a hundred and fifty signatures that day, which was very exciting for me, and he invited me to come travel with him to Ohio to work on another campaign and talk web. I couldn’t, but we still kept in touch and he ended up paying me $200 to get Adsense working again and try to get him into Google News. It wasn’t the most lucrative gig, but it gave me some confidence to sell bigger jobs and a story, too.
Miha Rekar
on 11 Feb 14The first page I made isn’t even on webarchives :D But this is the first one that is – my own website. This is the first one I made for a client – Kališče. Good old FrontPage :D
Chad
on 11 Feb 14In 2000, I got the crazy idea to start an intranet/extranet service. A company called silverorange inspired me. I found a programmer in Lithuania to build it and hired a Cal Poly CS student to re-build it :) I handled the interface with my DIY Fireworks and PHP skills! My first client helped fund the development so it worked out financially too. Here’s a screenshot: http://www.scienceofleads.com/projects/instant-interact/.
Alex Cabrera
on 11 Feb 14My first commercial project was built for $3,000 under the banner of NOBR Interactive, a company I co-founded with someone I’ve been friends with since second grade at the age of 16. The company was named after the long since-forgotten HTML element. I’m pretty sure the logo our attempt at making an N that looked like the Wu-Tang W.
The site was for a company named Primetime Amusements, which at the time only leased arcade machines. They are still very much in business, have expanded a ton, and the website we launched in 1999 helped them their biggest deals at the time, paving the way for a ton of future success.
My favorite part of the site, by far, is the original splash page animation we made where we shamelessly stole music from Megaman 2, traced over the Megaman sprite for the main character, and straight lifted art direction wholesale from Super Mario Bros.
Jason Fried
on 11 Feb 14@Chad Silverorange was awesome. Really great design firm. Their intranet product was outstanding for the time.
Chris Kottom
on 11 Feb 14I got out of school in 1995 just as the Internet started to be a thing, and I lucked into a gig with a company that specialized in NeXT and Smalltalk development that was run by an alumnus of the same school I attended – Dan McCreary. I was immediately subcontracted to a marketing company that was managing websites for the NHL and Gatorade, so the first code I was ever paid to write was HTML and Perl CGI delivered to a real audience, even though the traffic at that time was a complete joke by today’s standards. The earliest versions in the Internet Archive are from November 1996, so they aren’t exactly how I remember them, but the Gatorade site is pretty close. https://web.archive.org/web/19961112102516/http://www.nhl.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961105041943/http://www.gatorade.com/
Ralph von der Heyden
on 11 Feb 14It’s funny to see that you refer to your freelance identity as “we”. I did the same when I started out (wanna be big company, right?), but quickly abandoned the “we” until I had a real company with multiple (two, that is) people on board.
Jason Fried
on 11 Feb 14@Ralph “We” was definitely a sign of insecurity.
Jess Brown
on 11 Feb 14Great post Jason. I have a lot of similarities with my story. I’m a finance major too. I was working in the commodities business (trading grains) when I got my first real project. It was for a technical trader who also taught me a lot. He retired recently, but his site is still up: www.coberlyma.com. I think that was from 2003.
Hey, I have a simple design suggestion. What do you think?
Jamie Tibbetts
on 11 Feb 14Jason- The Prophet project was a huge milestone for me as well. When you told me at the time that you made $600 for doing a website, I instantly started learning HTML. Almost 20 years later, I’m still doing web design/development. So I’m also glad Tim took a chance on you. :)
Matt
on 11 Feb 14My first web design gig I managed to get $8k for putting together a 100+ pg site for a rug designer. This was before there were handy CMS tools (2003) or at least before I figured them out. The site grew her sales by $50,000 that year. I was proud of that.
Ka Wai
on 11 Feb 14My first web design project I got paid for was for a “Subsurface Utility Engineering” company called Geotrack. Quite honestly, I can’t recall how I got in touch with them—I’m pretty sure it was a flyer on a posting board in my dorm lobby. Here’s the largely-intact site design from 1998.
Like you, Jason, I got a lot more out of it than the $20/hour I charged. I learned how to learn-on-the-fly (view sourcing pages was the quickest way to learn most any design technique back then), how to write up a timesheet, how to invoice a client, “soft skills”, how to say “no”, how to prioritize work (between classes and freelancing), how to (try to) build a brand. Those are skills I would not have gotten any other way. It was really an innocent time.
The other thing I remember thinking was how much more money I could make freelancing in web design vs. work/study jobs. I ended up with freelance gigs anywhere from $20-$50/hour. The best jobs on campus paid maybe ten bucks.
Anonymous Coward
on 11 Feb 14My first ‘commercial’ site was a website I built for my uncle’s Arabian horse farm. TKO Arabians
I’m sure there are a lot of us who got their start working for aunts and parents and cousins.
Than Tibbetts
on 11 Feb 14My first ‘commercial’ site was a website I built for my uncle’s Arabian horse farm. TKO Arabians
I’m sure there are a lot of us who got their start working for aunts and parents and cousins.
Devan
on 11 Feb 14My first ever development project was back in 1985 or so – using Turbo Pascal to write a point of sale system for a pharmacy. I actually found the 5.25” floppy disk containing the code when I moved house a few years back, but it was mouldy and I had no devices that could read that media any more. Isn’t it ironic that we can read clay tablets from centuries ago, but data from just a few years ago is lost forever!
I cannot remember my first web site, but I agree with others here that it was all ‘fly by the seat of my pants’ and a huge learning curve each and every time. I never took on a project unless it pushed me to learn more than I had on the previous one.
Lately I’ve enjoyed programming in iOS because the constraints of processing power and memory of those small devices was a fond throwback to the early days of cutting Pascal code on an 8088 machine.
Similarly, a recent transition to Ruby and Padrino was also a reminder of the elegance of the past.
I was most delighted to see that Embracadero (whats left of Borland) was still distributing those early versions of Turbo Pascal on their website for free. I might go back and see if I can still remember any of my earliest coding…
Robby
on 12 Feb 14My first web design project was in 2006. My task was to reformat and restyle a very out-dated, poorly formatted, and lengthy section of what was, at the time, a decent-looking rest of the site. The company was, ironically, focused on developing accessible multimedia products for the disabled. I learned HTML and CSS mostly on the fly and did the project for $800 in about two weeks as I recall. Not a bad haul for a college kid with little experience earning some extra cash over the summer.
Thinking back to what was involved, today I could likely have completed the project not in two weeks, but in two days.
Jared White
on 12 Feb 14Thanks for sharing this! It’s fun to look back at work done in the early days of the web. I can tell the thought you put into copywriting and information design is already present in your early work.
I dug up my web design business site from 2001: http://web.archive.org/web/20020803000517/http://gaeldesign.com/index.html
Glossy gradients were pretty new back then :)
Now like you once did I’m trying to get a software business going to eventually replace consulting work, but I think it’ll grow more slowly than Basecamp did. Clearly you had the right kind of product at the right time, and apparently that’s still the case!
Jared White
on 12 Feb 14Sorry, I really should have previewed that last post! Correct links:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020803000517/http://gaeldesign.com/index.html
now trying to get a software business going…
Fahad
on 14 Feb 14Great post, Jason. The first website I created was in 1996. I was in eighth grade at the time and like you, I learned HTML by viewing the source code of other websites. It was dedicated to the Chicago Bulls!
Unfortunately, I had it on Geocities and can’t find it. There was a frame on the left that acted as a side nav but would scroll independently of the main frame which was pretty fun. Oh I also made an animated GIF that was a bull that snorted out air because it was angry that was the logo of the site. I was shocked a couple of years ago when animated GIFs made their resurgence.
This discussion is closed.