A warm welcome...
- Details
- Published on Sunday, 18 March 2012 16:22
- Written by Mark Harding
Today marks the release of our blog, something I've meaning to do get round to releasing for a while now. The plan for this blog is going to be to add a new post every so often to let you all know about projects we are working on, our views on current technology and also step by step tutorials for you DIY development.
I always get asked how I learn't to 'code'. The truth is, I never got taught or have even had single lesson on coding from anyone. IT at school was incredibly dull and boring and I never learnt anything from it - I often found I new more than the teacher! Anyway, I picked up coding by meddling about with Adobe Dreamweaver when I was 11. I soon found the limitations of 'drawing' out a website design and starting analysing the source code of what I was doing. This is basically how I learnt HTML (I know, the most basic of programming), simply analysing code and reproducing it. Eventually, by using trial and error, I was able to produce a pretty convincing website.
It wasn't long before I saw the limitations of HTML. I wanted to create a login page for my site so that only certain users could view parts. Clearly, the best way to achieve this was to use PHP. As before, I looked at PHP code, analysed it and then reproduced it. PHP is very similar to HTML so it wasn't too difficult to pick up.
So, with HTML and PHP under my belt I started meddling about with all sorts of sites. Eventually, I stumbled upon Joomla!. My school was using this for their website and I was amazed at how slick and fast it was, and also how customisable you could make it. My very first site to go public was an E-Commerce site I built on top of Joomla!, selling Sibelius (a piece of composing software for musicians). They sold like hot cakes, due to my extremely low prices undercutting everyone. To cut a long story short, I had to stop because they introduced a minimum order policy. Being only 15 at the time I couldn't stump up and risk the money!
After playing about with Joomla! for a while, I started looking at social networks. It was about the same time that Facebook was being discovered in schools. I downloaded the open source social platform Elgg. It's a fantastic piece of software and very easily to build a completely customised site onto of. My very first Elgg powered site was called MaestroZone. It was built as a community for musicians to share and sell their music. Due to fierce competition out there, it didn't take off. However, had it not been for MaestroZone, I would not be writing this blog post today.
I started Kramnorth in June last year due to the amount of interest I was getting from my work on the Elgg platform. I'd been doing small jobs for people before then but large orders starting coming in and I had to make everything official. Since I set up shop, Kramnorth has continued to expand. We have iOS apps, Android apps and more elgg sites all soon to be released and customers knocking at our door (well email account) all the time.
I hope you have enjoyed reading this first blog post and that you found how I got started interesting. If you have any questions or need help then please feel free to give me a shout. My email address is This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
Look out for the next post soon...