In 1998 there were about 3 million websites. Mine was one of them. It was not my first website - that I built in 1994 in HTML but without a provider. And the domain was different. My first website was chocolate.pages.vossnet.de or something like that. The current domain, chocolatecheese.de, I have been paying for since 2001. I created the website because at the time I was catering, and making chocolate sculptures. Even then I thought it would be a good idea to have visibility on the internet. It was a lot easier to be found back then. The website did not help me get any catering business - word of mouth did that - but it did land me my first agency gig.

In 1999 Springer and Jacoby opened a spinoff in Munich and Hamburg for "New Media" called Graffiti. I started there making websites, animated banners, Flash sites etc. for all the big companies at the time. Most noone had a website, so business was good! My chocolate website was so poorly coded, that the Head of New Media, Joerg Geissler (we still work together today) hired me thinking I must be a genius. Why? He thought my website was ironically coded. Who else would code so poorly?

Check out the link for the homepage of that iconic website. There were about a dozen pages in the original.