Ya, well people are not born with designing/coding or any other capabilities, they learn it and perfect their skills in time, of course if they like what they are doing. The worst job is when your doing something that you don’t like: time passes slowly and you can’t wait to go home. This is why i would be a sucky coder,lol.

I really hate coding, you got so many lines to write lots of lines, learn lots an lots of codes and attributes, and it looks really boring. As a designer i can use my creativity @ max, but still i have to respect some standards(to design in a way that the coder has an easier job and the site where the design will be used won’t have a huge load time.

Back in 2005 i was a complete noob in websites and web development and such.I just got my internet connection setup. I had a counter-strike clan and really wanted to make a website for it. I found a great free host(back then) , signed up having no idea how to create a website.

A colleague of mine suggested that i use Web Page maker a easy to use website builder software for newbies. I downloaded ti and i really enjoyed it. used a predefined template for the first version of my website, after which i saw a design somewhere and saved the images from it and manually combined them together with web page maker.

I searched google for some counter strike related images and made the sections for my site. I remember how happy i was when i found a free forum host. I signed up and made my first forum(even though it was remotely hosted). As a web counter i used the crappy bravenet counter and submitted my website to lots of romanian toplists.

When i found about Google Adsense i decided to sign-up and after my account got accepted i placed the ads on my website thinking that i will earn atleast 10-30$/day. Those 10-30$/day turned into 0-0.05$/day. Heck i clicked the G ads 1-2 times/day,well till i found out that i can get banned for doing that.

Meanwhile i joined the free host’s support forum where i showed off my site. Some congratulated me, others critiqued me and suggested that i use dreamweaver than web page maker. This was the point when i realized that the usage of web page maker isn’t a good way. I learned lots and lots form that forum, starting from how to setup my own forum to how to manage a website and how to think stuff over before acting. Also i got the chance to learn a bit of seo also.

A year later i became moderator there. Too bad that the admins who managed it left the hosting company and since then the forum is really empty.

For a long time i was playing outwar(i’m still palying it) and because 100 points cost like 5$ i started making profile and crew pictures. I searched for wallpapers and cut the images out and put text over it. Got 10-20 points for a pictures. After that i met xnight from who i learned a bit of GFX and he basically showed me the road to gfx. We started a gfx forum which ran for 2-3 months after which people started fighting and disputes rised, and i didn’t have a proper webhost so we closed it.

From that point till december 2006(till i found digitalpoint forums) i didn’t do anything significant on the web, mostly played dota/counter-strike/diablo 2 onlineand played ow and made profile/crew pictures.

I also got a free domain name linkyard.net and made a web directory and submitted my directory into directory lists like Directorycritic but then abandoned the project because i had the domain trough accountexec over at godaddy.com and i couldn’t contact the owner.

When i found digitalpoint i think i was searching for some GFX tutorials to make better pics for players on outwar so i can pull more points, and then started browsing around, and saw a make money online with this guide thread and so i signed up and started posting. I was overwhelmed by all the new posts that popped up and posted only in those that i was interested in.

I made my first website design on 5th january 2007 and sold it on 7th january for an amazing ammount of 2$. I think i could have sold for more, but at that time i didn’t have paypal available in my country, so i tried selling using alternate payment options:

“payment trough egold(sorry guys, paypal isnt available in my country), i also accept western union(rofl i cant believe i said that)”

I think i worked like 6 hours on that design, as you can see almost all fonts are pixel fonts(back then i didn’t know that you have to actually have the font on your PC to display it, lol). But heck it was a start, i peaked over at other people’s designs and saw that how and what are the basic structures of a design and did stuff on my own. This is one of the 2 proxy designs i made in my entire life. I don’t like to design proxies, they don’t sell for much.

Tim Garcia, a guy who i knew from outwar and was added to my messenger list(i have no idea how he got there) helped me a lot to start up. I just asked him how i got him in my messenger list and we started talking and started a crew together on outwar which today is a TOP 5 crew. We trusted eachother and this helped me a lot. Mostly because he was from USA and had a paypal account. He let me use his account( when i wanted to send money i told him where to send it, and when i got money i used his paypal email and kept logs of incoming/outgoing $) till paypal was fully available here in Romania also. We are good friends, we chat about different stuffs daily, share opinions and…we still play outwar(we are addicted to it,lol).

For a long time i auctioned my directory themes for 5-20$/piece but then got an offer from Sam to design him a custom directory theme for valentine day/business directory usage. I remember i got 30$ for the job. That was a turning point in my designer career and i started looking for customers who want custom themes. It was a bit hard, because i had low itrader rating and not much of a big portfolio to show, but i got a few people who hired me and that way i slowly built up a portfolio(not the current one), but i still kept selling designs for 5-20$.

Meanwhile i started my own premium directory and in about 6 months my directory got PR 4 and about 60 links have been submitted generating an income of about 150$. I sold the directory to a guy from digitalpoint for 400$, and i have absolutely no regrets.

I saw threads where people were selling wordpress themes so i taught il give it a try and made a wordpress design(in like 5 hours). I enjoyed designing it so much that since then i enjoy designing wordpress themes the most. In my opinion you can be extremely creative at designing wordpress themes.

I progressed and saw that web 2.0 designs get higher bids, and more and more people are looking for them, so i decided to check out web 2.0 standards and examples.

Back in april i started a romanian webmaster community for which i bought hosting from Servage , a vbulletin license and a .ro domain name. The community still runs, and now and then contest are organized. For a while i had revenue sharing implemented, but removed it because no1 benefited from it because the CPC was very low:0.001$-0.005$ because only romanian sites were advertised.

So i designed lots and lots of wordpress themes that i got coded and sold sponsored links on them or just bought the ready coded themes. It was a great source of income, i got like 200$ from 3 sponsored links, till themes.wordpress.net stopped accepting sponsored themes. Then the prices dropped with like 300-400% so i stopped doing it.

I practiced and practiced till i got to a point when i decided that i will no longer auction my themes and i will only make custom themes. I started with charging 40-60$/custom theme design and now i’m charging 170-250$/custom design because the quality of the themes got better and better.

For quite a while i’m only posting in BUY/SELL/TRADE sections of digitalpoint, because in the other categories i rarely find topics i’m interested in. I used to like Reviews section, but it got fiulled with topics where people ask opinions about a forum/blog which they installed a hour before and setup a free theme for them.

I deleted all the designs from my old portfolio and placed only the new custom designs that i made(there are a few exceptions that will soon be deleted).

Now more and more customers come and interact with me, this meaning that i have to search for work rarely. I can thank this to my itrader rating over at DP forums and the references, and ofcourse my portfolio .

My father was a journalist and even though he wasn’t always there for me i learned much from him and it seems that i inherited the talent of writing. Thats why in august last year i started My blog where i decided to write only about stuff that i like(technology/IT & C).

I decided to release Free themes that don’t have sponsored links(why should i fill your blog’s footer with rubish links?), only a Designed by: link pointing back to my blog, and i will still continue to periodically do it. This helps my blog get more exposure, this meaning more readers. If someone makes a blog and doesn’t have readers than he’s writing for himself.

This said, currently i run my romanian webmaster forum and my blog,projects which i won’t abandon. Also i’m saving and investing money into a future cool project which hopefully will generate a constant flow of passive revenue(free money), but as they say: “to get money, you need to invest money”