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In the year 2000, Philip set out on a Web Masters journey. A pilgremidge. It started with a menu site. He only knew text and how to put pictures, while others were superior and he had to relay on them to get off their butts and work LOL. Since they were lazy, he had to learn from scratch.

Hence http://www.geocities.com/theconnaisseur/ was borne. He originally had his own web space at $100 USD for two years.

Then that site began to rot, because it lacked marketing and money.

A year passes and a friend from work, Grant creates Philip some web space and says see what you can do with this. It was one web page with two pictures, copied javascript and some links - all making fun of me LOL. It was a cute site. Then Peterhawkes was born. His identity was a mystery to everyone. Who was Peter Hawkes???

Peter Hawkes was a patient of my fathers, who had brain malfunctions and had an obnoxious manner for someone in his station ~ financially, he wasn't gifted at all. He looked like a grot and above all he was impatient and thought the world should accomodate him !

So new pages were created in dedication of him ~ galleries, stories and yahoo profiles. Eddie, Ian and Philip would go into chat rooms and use his profiles and make fun of people. It was quite entertaining.

Suddenly, the website grew and soon it held 4 pages, then 10....in terms of hits it was nearing 500 after the first two months ! Then Philip realised a good website changes, so you get repeat hits and Philip thought in terms of 'this photo will provide my site with 10 hits' LOL. So he changed the labels and pictures. He made a site of the month and other changing pictures.

Since the site was about Hawkes, all sites relating to the word 'hawkes' were included. Then Philip bought a spy-cam and he went around the city of Sydney taking pictures of the homeless, wierdos and funny people. The swaggerer was the highest profile bum in Sydney. He even appeared in the newspaper (front page of the business section).

Then he got webspace at angelfire as the site was growing in content. When he started travelling the world, more pictures had to be uploaded. Then a Yahoo Group was created where he told his tales in a satirical fashion. Angel fire held pictures of his travels as well as pictures of Indy.

During Indy time, Philip learnt about thumbnail pictures, javascript and Flash. The site was modernising and becoming dynamic. the great thing about Indy was the pictures brought tonnes of hits. Whether it be plonkers, blondes or the general atmosphere, this all equated to HITS and maybe TITS ! woohooo !

Using the spy-cam we got lots of pictures as well. We also upgraded hiring a laptop and using a more expensive digital camera for long range shots.

Then the site decayed a little. I met a girl called Theressa. A bum from Lawson. A site sprung up dedicated to her. It was a a site where you could dojate money to her to help her life. There were payment options from links to bank sites to PayPal. New games were created. Philip learnt Visual Basic and created frogger, tank and storm games. A magic 8 ball of excuses because Theressa was fabulous at excuses and normally the magic 8 ball provides answers, not excuses ;-)

Philip also learnt how to use a gif animator and since his skills in graphic arts were not as good as his Real life arts - drawing and painting, he drew the slides for the animation and then used a scanner to upload them to the computer. He would then record the animation.

Two years have passed and in 2005 attention was turned from a redundant IT sector to books and mortar business. Self financed I started a wine business and I've sold 18 cases of wine to 10 restaurants in 2 months of operations.

whilst the web design has been put on hold, the knowledge is still with me.
I created an online ordering system and have made my wine site completely dynamic.
I do not believe web sites sell anything other than information. People ring me for my wine, not via email and after a critique I read of my site at : http://www.amputate.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=7684&sid=059b11502c33bb25e5401e154cdc4179 I realised how useless web designing is from a business point of view. Sure the advertising is cheap, but internet advertising isn't that great ;-).
I think everyone should have a footprint, but it doesn't have to be great. IT geeks want you to think that the web site is important, but it isn't THAT important.

Wine website
Our family website Which includes a forum and much more !