Building jeff-z.com
Jeffrey Zweizig Jeff Zweizig Jeffrey Zweizig Jeff Zweizig
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How I got from There to Here
jeff-z.com came into being on August 2, 2003... Although I had a few years experience tinkering around with a home PC and the Internet, I have no formal computer training and knew zero, zip, zilch about creating web pages or html code. One day I purchased a book: "A Complete Idiot's Guide to Creating a Web Page". After spending about an hour just reading the first four chapters of the book, I was sitting at my computer composing web pages. It's that easy. If I can do this, anyone can. Although I don't really have anything to compare it to, I would recommend this book to anyone looking to start their own web site. jeff-z.com was entirely created using not much more than Microsoft Notepad, Adobe Photo Deluxe and my digital camera. I might also mention that this was all done on an outdated six year old PC. Everything you need is probably already on your computer. The book also includes a CD with many useful applications. jeff-z.com is hosted by lowesthosting.com. I found this host using the guidelines in the above book. Once I found a potential host, my strategy was to do a google search on the host. The search would usually reveal some negative or positive feedback from others with experience using the potential host. At the time, I found no negative comments about lowesthosting.com. Again, I don't really have anything to compare it to, but I thought lowesthosting .com had very reasonable prices, has proved easy to use and so far I've had no problems. I also registered my domain name through lowesthosting.com Good luck with your own web site. Thanks to Matt Shreve for my cool "JZ" graphic... 
...and to Jon Johnstone for the next generation logo... 
www.jeff-z.com Business Cards 
I wanted the simplest domain name possible. I found that "jz.com" was already taken. Also, "jeffz.com" was already taken. So I settled for "jeff-z.com". It seemed simple enough, but I found that people still weren't always remembering if I'd just tell them verbally. Thus, I decided to design a simple business card. I started with a preexisting business card template within Microsoft Word. Then I went to Staples and bought some matching sheets of glossy business card stock by Avery. Specifically I bought Avery #8879. You just stuff the 8.5 x 11 sheets into your printer and then the page snaps apart into ten smooth edged business cards. Now I carry a few cards in my wallet and pass them out as needed. Rant I love the Internet. I think it's one of the greatest inventions of all time. And I'm proud to be a part of it. I constantly take advantage of all the information out there and I hope people take advantage of the information I've put on my site. But I hate Internet ads. Pop-up ads are the worst. Banners can be equally annoying. Please do your viewers a favor and get yourself a real web hosting service. My bill from lowesthosting is less than $80/year. And there are other services that are equally inexpensive. If you can't afford that, you might get a few megs of ad-free space with your ISP. What ever you do, stay ad-free. Your viewers will thank you. Archive One day I was feeling nostalgic and it occurred to me that I never saved any of my old web pages. With a search of the Internet I came up with archive.org and found some old snapshots of my website. The pages were somewhat corrupt from the archiving process, but I saved what I could and set about a web site restoration project. What I ended up with is about how jeff-z.com looked toward the end of 2003 when it was about three months old. Sadly, my oldest concepts have been lost forever. Click below... |