I can’t even begin to tell you how many memories finding this piece of my very first website brings me. Because I was on such a shoestring budget, I couldn’t afford a website designer, and had to develop the entire thing myself. Paying for the domain name & hosting it was all I could afford with my teeny tiny budget of GBP 700. I borrowed a friend’s copy of JShopPro (can’t believe they’re still in business after so many years), which allowed me to put shopping baskets into my HTML pages created in Microsoft Frontpage. I don’t know if you recognize the colour swatches, they were nicked from Sephora.com! I see that Sephora’s now changed all their swatches into rectangular little pieces, I honestly prefer them as they were so many years ago.
I didn’t know how to program discount codes or customer loyalty programs, and couldn’t afford any sort of value-added services (such as free shipping), so I offered our little paper bags free instead, thinking if it didn’t generate sales, then at least people would use it & carry it around, doing some form of marketing for me.
At that time, HSBC’s online transaction costs were really expensive compared to their offline ones (meant for a brick-and-mortar store, with a physical credit card terminal). So I applied for a physical card terminal, and fixed that right at home on my work desk (yes, was very much still working from my little apartment). It could take CNP (Cardholder Not Present) transactions, like catalogue and phone orders, which I did. So in actual fact, my website took “catalogue orders” instead of live, online ones!
I spent nights upon sleepless nights just building that website up, page by page. I had a total of 11 pages by the end of it, an accomplishment as far as I was concerned, and launched it to the world by 2001. It would take me another 4 years to build the business up so I could comfortably afford a proper website developer, but I will always remember my first homemade one.
A behind-the-scenes look into a cosmetics company 