In the beginning...
2005: Habbo Hotel Fansites & Piczo Homepages
Whilst browsing through a copy of Shout Magazine in July of 2005, I remember reading about a cool website where you could create a virtual character and take swims in pools, design your own rooms, make friends and dance the pixelated nights away. This website was Habbo Hotel, and as soon as I signed up, I immediately fell in love. I was fascinated by the look of the hotel, the website, and especially it's fansites. I was captivated that people like me could create websites dedicated to the things they love, and personalise them as much as they wanted. I had no idea how to make websites at this time, but I vaguely remember making a Geocities page with crudely copy-and-pasted text from the official website.
A little later along the way, I would discover Freewebs and make a very awful looking fansite (& a scam site! No one fell for it...) using the premade website templates that the website builder provided. Yuck.
Later on in the year, I was introduced to Piczo, which further solidified my love of websites. Having my own personal homepage, uploading photos of myself and my friends, and showcasing all the glittery MSN icons I'd collected along the way were the true pinacles of 2005 webdesign to me. This Piczo website was creatively named annabelle121, and had a colour scheme of aqua, fuschia and yellow. I would later rename this site to xDESTRUCTION-- in 2007.
2006 - 2007: Piczo Takes Over, and I learn to code
I had this site for 12 months. At the 6 month mark, I made another Piczo website in hopes of starting fresh and in true angsty preteen fashion I named it LongWayToHappy-x. I uploaded two pictures onto it, and then promptly left it.
September 2006 rolls around, and I create a new website named ToxicGasxo. This website was the turning point for me; I learnt how to use PaintShop Pro using free trials and following tutorials online, downloading hundreds of brushes from now-lost personal websites and LiveJournal blogs. I learnt HTML from websites such as Funky Chickens and various Piczo pages dedicated to HTML and visitor resources, such as VEJC and sweet-song-16.
In the meantime, I made two Freewebs sites (named bananabelle and ToxicGasxo respectively) in a HTML/CSS-only mode (no premade templates!) where I explored what I considered 'advanced' HTML, such as iframes and stylesheets.
After a year of ToxicGasxo, September 2007 came around. At this point, I wanted new challenges. The more I learnt about HTML, the more I realised that Piczo could not accommodate what I wanted to achieve. I wanted to spread my wings and leave Piczo behind... and thus, DisasterKisses.co.nr was born on 1st October 2007.
2008 - 2009: Finally 'hosted'!
DisasterKisses taught me all about FTP, using frames to build my website, and engaging in the thriving self-hosted blogging community. I made great friends with people from across the web, and despite the code being dreadful & some cringe worthy blog posts, I feel this stepping stone was essential in my webdesign journey.
I had DisasterKisses for around 5 or 6 months. Due to the free host and domain name package I had, my host did not support MySQL servers or PHP, so I was stuck with my iframe blog and HaloScan comment system. Around February/March, I noticed a friend of mine had opened up subdomain hosting applications. I sent in an application - and was accepted! I left DisasterKisses behind, and made a new home at PerfectDenial.RomanceBox.org. 
Shortly after this, her domain changed to Murexa - and thus I moved with her to PerfectDenial.Murexa.org. I loved this website, there's a special feeling of being hosted by a friend and having a hostee family (family members were other sites that were hosted by the same person).
Here, I learnt about improving my HTML & CSS knowledge, my Paintshop Pro skills, as well as stepping my first toes into PHP and WordPress. I followed various tutorials from Jemjabella and other WordPress tutorials online. I was never very good at PHP, and I still rely on visiting Stack Overflow from time to time.
At the end of 2009, my time being hosted had come to an end: Murexa.org had been suspended (wrongly, if I recall correctly). I was 15, and ready for something new...
2010 - 2011: Growing Up and doing it solo
On the 9th January 2010, PerfectDenial.org opened. This was my first ever 'proper' domain that I bought with my own pocket money and I begged my Dad to buy it for me as I had yet to own my own debit card.
Here, I immediately threw myself into the ins and outs of WordPress, plugins, PHP and validating my code. This was my intimate journal on the internet, home to every thought and feeling I had as an angsty 15/16 year old. I grew more confident with my PaintShop Pro/Photoshop skills and eventually made my own visitor content in the forms of tutorials, brushes, textures, and the like.
When I was 17, as the prospect of university drew near, I decided to make my own website to showcase the sketchbooks, photography, and paintings I was making whilst studying for my A-Levels. AnnabelleGralton.com is still online today, and was my first foray into a 'profressional' looking website, and centered website layouts.
2012 - 2013: Pocket Money Websites
Following the success of making a website for my high school's Art Department in 2011 as part of my Extended Project Qualification, I decided to branch out and try making websites for others. I did a handful of websites for local businesses, mainly local clothing brands and tattoo shops, but did not enjoy turning my hobby into a 'job'. The extra cash when you're a skint 18 year old is excellent, but overall I did not enjoy making them.
In the mean time, I was finishing up at college and getting ready for a new chapter at higher education. PerfectDenial had fallen on the back burner whilst I focused on my studies and battled various demons mental health wise.
2014 - 2018: The Dark Ages
I returned to blogging briefly in 2014, and with it I opened a forum: DecadentMB.org. I enjoyed learning about the XMB Forum script, and learnt more about PHP and SQL. However, this was short lived as my university commitments took priority. For the remainder of 2015, I did little to no website work.
I let PerfectDenial expire in 2016, forwarding all my old blogs to a subdomain on my portfolio website. This subdomain would gather dust and eventually be taken offline. Meanwhile, I made a website for our degree show in 2016. It scratched my webdesign itch, but nothing more.
In October 2018, I opened Belle.cafe in an attempt to have a fresh start at blogging. I had recently finished my masters degree, had just moved back in with my parents, and was feeling lonely and nostalgic. I was in the same room as I was 10+ years ago, blogging about my daily life as a teenager, but this time round there was nothing left of the blogging community to escape to. This website saw 6 blog posts, and then was abandoned. I commonly refer to these years as 'The Dark Ages'.
2019 - 2020: Love Rekindled
In 2019, the blogging itch reappeared. I had recently discovered Neocities, a free web hosting service for static websites with a thriving community of creative coders. When Belle.cafe expired, I used its most recent (and last) layout as the first layout for my new neocities website: Avenue.
Something about Avenue reawakened something inside me: whether it was the community surrounding it, or the static 'coded by hand' nature of the place, I loved it. I continue to dip in and out of blogging using this website.
In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic meant myself (and millions of others across the world) were spending a lot of time inside. I was furloughed from my part time job at Starbucks, and suddenly had all the time I'd ever wanted to work on the web projects I'd always dreamt of.
In April of 2020, I opened a shrine to my very first foray into webdesign: aptly namedPiczo (annabelle121). This website hosts as many old blog entries of mine as I can find from the Wayback Machine, and includes hundreds of pictures that tell the story of my teenage years - all which were most likely posted on Piczo, MySpace, and Bebo throughout the years. This website was great fun to make; I had found a way to express my deep love for creative websites and nostalgia for this period of my life.
2021 - 2022: Love turns into Passion
QueenBeat.moe was made in July 2021 to host the Queen Beat Zine - a zine lovingly made by myself and several others in a Discord server, and displays our feminine/online/magical girl aesthetic we aim for with every issue! Queen Beat is also hosted on Neocities and utilises their Supporter package.
In October 2021 (Octobers seem to be very inspiring months for me), after chatting with an old friend from the PerfectDenial days, I made an Instagram account dedicated to showcasing lost layouts of the now offline blogs that thrived in the early to late 00s: @00sbloglayouts. For this project, I dig around on the Wayback Machine and save websites that had their layout images saved. I then go into these archived files and repair & edit the layouts (where necessary) to their former glory before showcasing them on the account, featuring the site name, the years it was online for, and any additional important information.
There was such a positive response to this I felt that I had to do something more. I received message after message about how people missed the old blogging community, the websites, and the way the internet felt back then. This inspired me to create Salvaged.nu in March 2022 - a website fully dedicated to going through the archives of the aforementioned websites, salvaging any resources such as Photoshop brushes, textures, graphics, and reuploading them for people to enjoy once again. The messages I have receieved from starting this project have been incredbile - that I've been able to send them down memory lane, have allowed them to find the resources they spent hours creating as a teenager once again, and even reconnect with lost friends. ❤️
This project has impacted me greatly. It has inspired me to research more about the importance of archiving the internet, and encouraging digital creative expression. The brushes and resources that have been salvaged have been used in workshops with young people, using them to create extraordinary photo manipulations and digital collages. Digital collage artists have also used the resources in their works, and I often find Salvaged's URL pop up in lists of 'Awesome Sites' or 'Resources Used' when browsing Neocities. For this, I thank every single person that ever made a handdrawn brush set for others to download and use, scanned in a cool-looking piece of fabric, or sat for hours infront of Photoshop 7 making resources, all completely free of charge.
2023 - Present: Pushing myself
In 2023, with my online projects increasing, I wanted a website that displayed all of them in one place that also included a little bit about myself, how I got into websites, and so on. I wanted to challenge myself with CSS and JavasScript doing this project - so Belle.gallery was born! (Hey, that's this place.)
For the future, I would like to continue to push myself with CSS and JavaScript, as well as PHP & SQL. This includes building a forum, redesigning the Salvaged website's homepage, and creating a webring. If you think you can help out with any of these projects, let me know!