WorldLee

The history of WorldLee begins almost a decade ago, in 1995, at the dawn of the great Internet build-up. I was a young geek, in his junior year of high school, and someone in my circle of friends named Timmy, built a website about himself called “Timmy.com“. It was funny, clever, and inviting and that just irritated the crap out of me. I, of course, couldn’t stand by and let Timmy out do me, so I created the first version of WorldLee, known then as RoyleeTown.

It took me almost three months to design it, program it, and figure out how to upload it, but I was very proud of my first design. Of course, by today’s standards it was crude and simplistic, filled with programming glitches, and took forever to download because of the large graphic files. After uploading the first version, I received a great deal of positive feedback, which lead me to try and build other websites, including my most ambitious (and ultimately disastrous) attempt to design the website for NC Central University.

After that disaster my first year in college, I stopped updating RoyleeTown and let it drift into the ashes as I struggled with my very real and often difficult life situations. As time went on, and I became more settled in my life, I revisited the idea of having my own personal website and although I did not maintain a personal website, I still worked as a professional website designer learning many useful programming and database skills. I decided to think bigger than RoyleeTown, which only described who my friends were, had a group picture of my family, and what I was looking for in a potential mate. I decided that everything about me needed to be digitized… my personal journal, my photo albums, and my music collection. It was time to expand RoyleeTown and create WorldLee.

As often happens with me, I kept starting revisions of the site, but never actually finishing them. I kept trying to make WorldLee bigger, which meant redesigning the site layout, learning new programming skills, adapting the already existing stuff. It got to be that the only thing I hadn’t included in the website was the kitchen sink, and at one point, that was probably on the drawing board. It looked like WorldLee v2.0 might never come to pass. Then, about two years ago, I made a new years resolution to scale down the site, and have it finished before 2005 rolled around.

With a lot of sweat, sleepless nights, and caffeinated beverages, version 2.0 was brought into the world in March 2005. Version 2 of my website was completely different from RoyleeTown. It was built from the ground up to be highly extensible. The programming was done using a combination of Flash, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, PHP, and SQL. It was highly complex, including an extensive photo album, the contents of my journals from the last 4 years, and an autobiography that could’ve filled a library wing.

Clearly, I had a lot to say.

Despite the fact that the site interface looked great and it was a beautifully designed site, it did not receive much fanfare, though my mom thought it was nice. I was hesitant to tell people to go look at this site because it was never quite finished in my mind. So version 2.0 was born, came, and died, within months of its delivery. Version 3.0 was an attempt to return to my roots. I abandoned the idea of having Flash introduction and instead chose a more traditional homepage design.

This version was built in the summer before I left North Carolina to go to Ohio State University. I thought I was finished and that all I had to do now was write journal entries and keep adding and updating to my site. Little did I know, having a part time job, full time school, and a relationship would eat up all of my free time for a full year, and it wasn’t until December of 2006 that I had a chance to get back to work on the site.

As is the case with any project I leave for a while, I had grown and changed, but the site design was part of my past and not the new vision of my future I saw, so I scraped the design and went with something new. Which would’ve been fine, except I never managed to do more than have a few links finished before I had to go back to school. So Version 4.0 (Uncaged) came, went and was largely ignored.

 Finally, with version 5 (Enlightened) I have taken the evolution of the web and brought it full circle. I’ve integrated the disparate areas of the web that I live in and merged them with a design that is finally complete. It may have taken 12 years since that first website, but I have finally created the all inclusive site for my life, professional and personal.