In 1997, I had already gotten familiarized a lot with the Internet, after 3 years working at CEGEDIM with dial-up modem connections, and currently working at SITA/Equant, a giant worldwide telecom provider present in more than 220 countries at the time, so strong of my experience with HTML/CSS, I started building my own website on GeoCities.
The site was relatively simple, but used some forms and CGI and was showing mostly pictures of the area (Grasse, in the South of France) and a gallery of paintings from my then-wife. I was overall pretty happy of the design, even though to today’s eyes it would look very flat, and possibly a little too colorful and blinking.
Once I moved to Atlanta, GA, I ended buying the hilger.ph domain (Philippines, but also the 2 first letters of my firstname…) since hilger.com was not available, and pointed the domain to that site. With GeoCities being acquired by Yahoo!, I had to update some links and pointers, and eventually the site died with GeoCities, along with the .ph domain which was getting too expensive…