About Mike Wiemholt

Mike Wiemholt

I was born in Eugene, Oregon and was raised their until I turned 18 (in 1995) at which time I moved to the Bay Area in California (where almost every other member of my family lived besides my mother and brother).

I had always been interested in art - taking a lot of it through High School. But after that, my interest seemed to fade. I stopped drawing/sketching or even thinking about it. But, while working for Sun Microsystem in '95, I had my first experience with the internet and fell in love. I found myself regularly surfing the web during breaks and staying after work to do the same. I would even come in on the weekends (off the clock) just to check out my favorite sites.

Before long, I started to wonder how they were made.

Mike Wiemholt the Designer

In the Fall of 1999, I ran into a site called Homestead.com. Its purpose was to provide people with a tool for making a website, especially for those who knew nothing about them. You basically would drag and drop elements of websites onto your page. This was extremely fun for me at the time, but by early 2000 it just wasn't cutting it. I wanted to do the real thing.

I read up on what people were using to make pages, and decided that Front Page was were I would start (and the fact that it came with Office made things pretty easy). I taught myself the basics of web design by simply playing with FP. During this time, I also picked up a copy of Photoshop and fell instantly in love with creating my own graphics. This too I taught myself by playing with Photoshop for hours at a time every day I could (which was almost every day after work - late at night and into the morning).

After some time there, I began saving (downloading) web pages so I could view and edit the HTML in FP - this taught me a lot initially about how HTML worked. I followed that up by buying an HTML book and reading it front to back. I eventually moved to Front Page 2000, and used that for a year, but by 2001 I had graduated to Dreamweaver and have been using it ever since. I currently use Dreamweaver MX.

I still have never taken a class whatsover that involved graphic arts or web design. Instead I rely on my years of practice and hands-on use.

I still feel like I learn something new every week - even if it isn't something solid you could put a name to, the experience gained is there. I think that's one of the things I really enjoy about this kind of work is that you will never know it all and there are always better ways to do something - it's always changing and growing which keeps things fresh.