Álvaro Aranda Muñoz
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From my first websites to Escribirr.com

Before I joined ABB Corporate Research, my first job, I made websites. Each one taught me something new, and that progress led me to create a blog about creative writing that reached half a million visits a year.

· 3 min read · by Álvaro Aranda Muñoz

HTML, CSS and Photoshop

My first websites were plain HTML and CSS. They were small, and that was the point: they were where I learned what design is and how to get around photography and Photoshop. I remember binge-watching Lynda.com (a learning platform later acquired by LinkedIn) almost every day to learn CSS, frameworks, JavaScript and more.

The first clients, and PHP

Ursache hair salon website with a dark menu and photos of hairstyles
Ursache, a hair salon (2011).
MuffinPHP website: a pink muffin over a red header, with a five-minute install guide
MuffinPHP, my own small framework (2013).

Then came the first clients, like a hair salon in 2011. I had to interview people to find out what to say, gather logos, photos and graphic elements, take some of the pictures myself, and learn more Photoshop, some photography, a little JavaScript and some PHP. Unfortunately, I only kept small, low-resolution screenshots from those years.

Later, PHP became the centre. I coded whole websites from scratch, and during my master's in Interaction Design at BTH I even built my own small framework, MuffinPHP (following the lessons and materials of the course), to understand what happens behind every page.

Two websites for a biobank

Conference website with a dark ribbon reading Madrid 2014 and the title 10 años de BioBanco
The website for the conference on ten years of the biobank, Madrid (2014).

With that framework I built my next client website: the site for a conference in Madrid in 2014, where an HIV biobank celebrated its first ten years. Red mattered there, because the biobank keeps blood samples, so the site was made of textured paper and one red line.

HIV HGM Biobank website with a header of red blood cells
The HIV HGM Biobank website, in Spanish and English (2014).

For the biobank's own website I took another path: I adapted a WordPress theme instead of writing everything myself. The design work moved away from the code, to stakeholder meetings to decide what to show, card sorting to find the right categories, and mood boards to set the tone.

Learning to blog: SEO and online marketing

Escribirr.com home page: How to write a book, with an orange typewriter on a blue desk
Escribirr.com, a blog about creative writing (2017).

Escribirr.com was different: less about code, more about writing. I set it up with WordPress as a blog about creative writing, and filled it with what I had learned as a student in many writing workshops. At its peak it had around 500,000 visits a year. It taught me WordPress, SEO and online marketing, and it made me practise something I still care about: writing to share what I know. It came just before my PhD, so all that writing practice turned out to be very handy.