I registered bekee.com in 2000. The internet did not start keeping receipts until a year later: the oldest capture in the Wayback Machine is dated May 20, 2001, at 4:39 in the afternoon, twenty-five years ago tomorrow.
It is not a good website. The background is a flat cornflower blue. Where my navigation used to be, there is a tidy column of broken-image icons, because the web does not keep your images for you; it keeps the alt text and the intention and lets the rest rot. Two text buttons survived: “about me” and “links.” In the middle, a white box, everything lowercase, because I thought that looked like design.
The first version is a job hunt. I had just finished a Commercial Art degree, and I wrote that I was looking for “a job in the design field with a company that employs an intelligent group of people that i can learn from.” I did not have a content management system. I had Notepad. When I wanted to change the page, I opened the HTML and changed the HTML. It was a blog before the world had a word for it, and I posted the way you would post: a funny site I found that day, a quote I liked, whatever was in my head. One of those quotes was “If you don’t bend, you’ll break.” I still say it, twenty-five years later, usually to someone else and occasionally to myself.
Which is how, a few captures later, the white box reads:
i got a job i got a job! i’ll still freelance for you tho. :)
I was twenty-four, and I had just written my entire career down without noticing. Twenty-five years later I lead a team of developers as a Director at my day job, and I have never once stopped freelancing on the side; that is gibson•works. The job and the “i’ll still freelance for you tho” have run next to each other the whole time. I just punctuate better now.
The tools changed completely. Tables became CSS. Notepad became a real editor. The spacer.gif retired. What did not change is the part underneath the tools: I wanted to make the web work for the person on the other side of it, I wanted to be near people I could learn from, and I wanted to keep a small practice of my own going on the side. All three are still true.
The images don’t load anymore. That is allowed. The intention came through fine.