maglud.com: The First Website I Ever Built

Every builder has a first thing. Mine was a website called maglud.com.

It was 1998. I was fourteen, I had just discovered Microsoft FrontPage, and suddenly the internet wasn’t something you only visited. It was something you could make. I’d already tinkered with free pages on GeoCities and Freeservers, but I don’t count those. maglud was the first one that was really mine.

A portal, because of course

Look at that homepage and you’ll see the whole late-90s internet in one screen. maglud was a portal, which is what everyone wanted to build back then: a chat room, a forum, a nature portal, a game centre, a music and MP3 corner, a webmaster corner, a “site of the week”, a news column and a sponsors box waiting for sponsors. Lime green, bright orange, underlined links everywhere, and a slogan I was very proud of: “for those who can feel quality.”

My favourite detail is on the right. Under “Para Kazanın!!!” (Make money!!!) there’s a referral offer: send a client to Maglud Web Dizayn, and if they have their website built, you get $30. Fourteen years old, and I already had an affiliate programme.

Website of the week, on national TV

At the time, Show TV had a programme called Online Show, presented by Jess and Ayşin Zeren, which picked a “site of the week”. One week, around 2000 if I remember right, they picked maglud, and I got about ten minutes on national television to talk about my site.

For a teenager who had built it in his bedroom, that felt like being handed the keys to the internet.

Glue, flyers and electricity poles

Getting visitors in those days wasn’t a matter of buying ads. I printed maglud flyers on our Epson LQ dot-matrix printer, went out at night, and glued them to electricity poles around the neighbourhood. It sounds absurd now, but it worked: maglud built up a genuinely respectable audience.

There’s a running joke in Turkey that local webmasters “never got past the r10 forums”. The truth is that scene had a prehistory. Before r10, there were places like iyi.net and zirve100, and Turkish teenagers were already trying to earn affiliate income through Commission Junction. I was one of them.

The first page of AltaVista

While I promoted maglud, I was also building websites for real companies. I loved it. My prices were on the high side, but when I talked to people, somehow I convinced them. At one point I was on the first page of AltaVista, the search engine everyone used before Google, for the Turkish keyword web dizayn. At fourteen.

I built sites for a long list of businesses, among them Bakaş Demir, Cem Örme, Tomany Tekstil, Azim Dağıtım, Nora CD and Beril Tekstil, plus many more whose names I can no longer remember. Most of them were static HTML pages, but I rarely delivered just a website. I designed their logos, shot the product photos myself and put the whole look together, a one-teenager agency before I knew the word.

By the middle of high school it wasn’t pocket money any more. It had turned into a respectable income for a high-school kid, and the work carried on well into my university years.

• 1998first site, built in FrontPage
• 14years old
• 10minutes on national TV
• $30per client referral

What maglud taught me

Looking back, maglud had every ingredient of everything I’ve built since: an idea that was slightly too big, the joy of making something real, a bit of shameless marketing, and the moment someone you’ve never met tells you they used it.

It also taught me the most important thing about starting: you don’t need permission, a team or a budget. You need a tool, a bit of nerve and, occasionally, a pot of glue.

This post is adapted from a longer Turkish piece on my startup story, originally published on Medium. The next chapter is VICAHEN.