Puneet Singh, a friend of my brother, asked me if I could make websites. This was after my brother, Rahul, had shown him some of my football wallpapers and gig posters. Puneet's father ran a small business and he wasn't happy with the current website. The ad agency had rendered the printable brochure as a series of images and dubbed it the website. This was 14 years back... in India... for a fledgling small business – I thought it was quite cool that they had any sort of website!
Anyway, I digress. I had no idea how to make websites. I felt like if I spent enough time on it, I could put a design together on Photoshop. But the rest of it - the coding and publishing and hosting – I'm not even sure I knew what these terms meant.
So, I tell Puneet that I can deliver his website.
The rest is history! I put together a design that was well-received and then got to work on the cutting edge web editor of the time - Macromedia Dreamweaver. I think it's about as far away from a self-explanatory name as you can get. It took a couple of months, and long nights watching wonderful full screen video tutorials from Lynda.com – but it was done and hosted and published
Rs 15,000 is what I received for my work. I was fucking thrilled!
