homepage Susanne Hugo

My long journey to webdesign

I started working with computers 1985 at the university. We had access to computers at the faculty. Do you remember these black sreens with green and orange fonts ? I do. The progress made is just incredible.

At my first job in Rwanda, we had computers at the headquarters, but e-mail was still far away. When I started to work in Rome for FAO in 1993, e-mail existed and Hotmail was one of the few tthat provided e-mails with international access. I signed up back than.

Part of the job were Powerpoint presentations; to do that properly FAO provided classes. Or teacher was ⇗Luigi Canali de Rossi from Ikonos New Media, whose company was working for our working group and created the design for DAD-IS.

Well, I created my presentations, used the internet for research, information and fun. I had lousy modem connection and hated it, when pages took ages to load and the information I was looking for was hidden somewhere. However, I admired the creativity of webdesigners and did not dare do to webdesign myself for a long time.

In 2001, when I started working in Vietnam, my employer - the German Development Service - presented the current projects on his website. I wrote a desription of my project and gave it to our public relations officer - who was new to the job -, to transfrom it into a website.

I found out that building a webpage is not as difficult as I thought, and I wanted to do that, too. I found the time after my return to Germany and began to learn about HTML in earnest. My apporach is to create sites which are easy to navigate, load fast and no frills, no cookies, no flash.

My first attempts were table based layouts without CSS, than I combined it with CSS, and by now it is XHTML with CSS plus aiming at making this site accessible for handicapped people.

English and German language site links are presented. In addition I would like to recommend a hoax warning service. Enjoy.

The following links are gouped in:

Examples of my work
CSS and HTML basics
Web developer tools

Examples of my work

⇗DSB Kowolik GmbH: Homepage, design, content and webmaster, first pulished in November 2008, webmaster from 2008 to 2015
⇗Brigitte Hofmann - Homepage Brigitte Hofmann, Jin Shin Jyutsu teacher, design: Brigitte Hofmann; XHTML and CSS by me in April 2009 (nowadays her site is run by her family)
⇗Uschi Hugo: my sister; webmaster to present, homepage, first published on November 19, 2007
⇗Prof. Dr. Peter Hugo: my dad; Homepage at TU-Berlin, published first December 2005 until 2015 I was responsible for content and design
Zentral-Station: After my own page, I designed a site for clients who do sell second hand model cars and model-trains. I was the webmaster for two almost two years. (published: February 13 2005, new webmaster December 5, 2006). If you are interested in model-trains, please visit their actual site:
http://www.zentral-station-berlin.de
Astrology · Layout for those who search the truth about themselves, a CSS experiment with position: absolute and background-image: fixed
CSS Pop ups · The power of CSS, experimenting with text-box and image pop-ups
Mini-Tutorial · How to build a webpage in three steps, structuring headlines, navigation and content using semantic mark-up and a bit of CSS. The tutorial is in XHTML 1.0 strict.
CSS layouts for navigation bars

Buttons

When I re-edited my homepage in 2007, I created a few buttons with Adobe Photoshop. I like them and if you like them, too, feel free to copy and use for youself. A credit would be appreciated, however.