What twenty years online taught me about building better websites

If you only see the portfolio, you might picture a straight line from beginner to Kent web designer shipping Next.js builds. Mine was slower. I started curious and self-taught, spending evenings on why something looked wrong or refused to validate.

Twenty years on, the question is the same: how is this experienced, and how do I make it clearer, faster, and more trustworthy?

I have been saltedm8 online for a long time. On phpBB I joined in 2006, contributed styles, and spent hundreds of posts helping people solve layout problems. Forums were my classroom: you posted code, someone tore it apart, you fixed it.

Around the same time I was on DeviantArt doing logos and vector work, and on the Web Designer Forum as Fuzzy Logic, arguing about structure, type, and what web design is actually for. I earned rank there by helping, posting work, and taking criticism.

I studied web design at Canterbury Christ Church University under Alan Meades, who came from graphic design and had built the Digital Design suite there. You did not get away with “I like it”. You had to know who the work was for and why you had arranged the page that way.

Later I spent time on a masters in visual effects at the University of Kent, mostly in Nuke and Maya under David Byers-Brown, whose credits include Who Framed Roger Rabbit and years at ILM. Timing, depth, and where the eye goes in a frame turned out to be useful on the web as well.

RecipeBite was a food community at recipebite.co.uk on vBulletin, with a custom index: featured posts down the centre, blogs on the side, recipe categories a stranger could actually navigate. I added the vBrecipe mod and a video section, then posted the header on WDF for honest feedback because I was developer-first and needed designers to push me. In July 2008, when the site was only a couple of months old, vBulletinSetup on AdminFusion named it Breakthrough Board of the Month.

Mediasofa was my Sittingbourne studio, taking on web design and marketing for local businesses. Dot Voice came later, then Tracer. Different names on the invoice, same work getting more settled.

I was design-first for a long time. I picked up React and modern CSS on WDF and CodePen the honest way: broken repos, public questions, layout bugs I could not explain. The stack behind the sites on this portfolio is React, Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind. Side projects like SitePad, a notes extension I built for how I actually browse, kept the development side moving.

I have been interested in search since the RecipeBite days. What helped was usually dull and practical: pages that loaded, headings that made sense, copy written for humans. On client work that means proper titles, canonical URLs, structured data where it helps a local business show up correctly, and town pages written the way people in Kent actually search.

Next.js helps because pages can be server-rendered, so search engines get real content in the first HTML response. I test on slow phones as well as my own machine. My free site audit uses the same checklist I run on Tracer builds.

Since those early projects I have built websites for local trades, hospitality businesses, professional services, community organisations, and independent retailers across Kent. The technology has changed repeatedly. The goal has stayed much the same: help businesses present themselves clearly online and turn visitors into customers.

Tracer is the studio I work under now. I design in Figma before writing code, mark up for search as well as humans, and visit most clients in person across Sittingbourne, Sheerness, Maidstone, and Canterbury. If any of this sounds familiar from WDF, phpBB, or RecipeBite, the username is still saltedm8.