2005 – 2007 · Remote
Webmaster (blogs and first websites)
Entrepreneuriat personnel — Web projects run independently from 2005 to 2011, and the first sites delivered to clients.
Discovery of blogging platforms in 2005, as a teenager. A personal blog, then a class blog reaching five hundred monthly visitors, then a second at two thousand. A third, a humour blog, entered the platform's top 100 in September 2005 and held there for a year between ten and fifteen thousand visits a month; a fourth succeeded it. Close to five hundred thousand cumulative visitors between 2005 and 2009, peaking at forty thousand a month.
HTML and CSS came quickly: the principle is that of BBCode, practised for years on those same blogs. A first personal page in 2006, then a site for a second-hand postcard resale business, then a dynamic site offering ASCII and BBCode decoration elements for download, built in PHP, then the first showcase site for a web agency that existed only as an idea.
Alongside this, a series of traffic acquisition devices built on the platform's own mechanics: first-name compatibility tests, an astrological compatibility test, a page offering fake software supposedly revealing who had blocked you on instant messaging — all built on the same pyramid device, "send this site to five people, then click". The blog embedded in a frame, an ad network to monetise and buy back audience. Later, a JavaScript robot walking the platform's identifiers to issue contact requests by the hundred, and a viewer extracting the list of recently connected profiles in order to visit them — the platform showing who had viewed your page, a visit generated a click back.
These devices are mentioned because they built most of the period's skills — a spread of languages, technical constraints worked around, reading user behaviour, seeing what an information system exposes — and because they give first-hand measure of what questionable practice looks like on the web, and of the reasons to leave it behind.
Finally, use of the platform's advertising mechanisms: buying homepage placement, display networks. A first encounter with paid traffic acquisition, fourteen years before it became a line of work.
Achievements
- 500 000
Two projects stopped in 2011
The CMS, and a prize-game platform started with a non-developer partner. Entering working life left no room for development run alongside it.
- 4 pages built and optimised
Showcase site delivered end to end
An introduction to the practitioner and to each of her services, a booking system, a guestbook, a contact form.
Traffic acquisition devices
First-name and astrological compatibility tests, a page offering fake software supposedly revealing who had blocked you on instant messaging — all built on the same pyramid device. The blog embedded in a frame, an ad network to monetise and buy back audience.
First experience of advertising monetisation
Buying homepage placement on the platform, and the display networks of the day.
Search optimisation of the content
Carried out after go-live, as a continuation of the delivery rather than as a separate engagement.
Automation on the blogging platform
A JavaScript robot walking the identifiers to issue contact requests by the hundred, and a viewer extracting the list of recently connected profiles in order to visit them, the platform showing who had viewed your page.