Recently, we received a raving review from a satisfied club member. We were familiar with the calibre of her site, and were flattered by the praise of such a talented designer.

And so, we decided that Moyra should be the first of our featured member interviews...

Site Title: Moyra's Web Jewels
Web Adress: http://moyra.com/jewels

Why did you get on the web?

In 1995, after having watched several programmers I knew put their sites on the Web - and hideous sites they were too! - I decided there was a lot of room for non-programming pixel pushers on this medium.

I created my own first website - equally horrendous - in March of 1996, the most difficult way there is: in Note Pad.

I still get the shivers when I remember what a nightmare battle I waged with HTML, when all I really wanted was to create the "look and feel" of sites. I would have given up right there and then, and indeed, I never bothered to update my first site. I created it in order to teach myself how to create graphics for the web, as opposed to for print or for the online medium.

Despite the horror that was my first website, many found me and started commissioning me to create graphics for their web sites. I got so busy that I never even thought of my gruesome first web site, and when I did, all I remembered was the horror of my initial forays into HTML.

Later in 1996, I was introduced to Front Page, which was better than Note Pad, although still awfully awkward, and shortly thereafter, NetObjects Fusion 1 was released. Yes, that's right - I bought NetObjects when it still cost over 500 US dollars, and have loved it ever since. It is an investment I have never had cause to regret. It saved me from NotePad, and it allowed me to create at the level I wanted to create - "look and feel" - in a completely visual fashion.

In 1997, I decided that as an artist, I was stuck in a strange dimension which involved the creation of endless navy and grey images for very corporate clients, when my own tastes tended to run into the more elaborate and illustration oriented. I also took a really good look at what little was out there as far as web graphics were concerned, and decided there was ample room for me to create a "linkware" web graphics site with images that would function as my "walking advertisements". The intention of "Moyra's Web Jewels" was simply to pull in clients who were interested in my services as an artist and illustrator with a more elaborate range of imagery than what was and is common on the web.

It worked. In the two years since the Web Jewels opened, they went from 0 hits to a million and a half hits a week, with between 2700-3500 unique visitors every day. I stay incredibly busy as an artist and designer, and I run into my digital baubles all over the place.

When I decided to launch a "graphics site", I made the commitment to create an entirely new set of images to give to my visitors as "linkware" on a weekly basis, and created a ton of regularly updated content areas. This is a commitment I have kept for two years now, and I believe that the favorable reception my work has had on the Web has a great deal to do with the regularly scheduled content additions. Clients often tell me that they hired me because of the quality of the imagery, but also because of the dedication and commitment evident in my weekly update policy. This also brings me a great deal of returning visitors, who show up faithfully every Monday to view the new offerings.