Once upon a time...
…there was a young lady with a passion for music and a desire to promote artists for a living. She had a crazy idea that Internet might just be the key to make this happen in a time when the music business was still resisting the rise of the world wide web. It's the year 1996. This is the story of myself, Nora Tol, and Virtual Publishing.
During the course of my teen years it already started to show I had some enterpreneurs blood flowing through my veigns. All the business ideas I had were always directed or closely related to the music business. Fanclubs were started or supported, and there once was a bright idea to start my own music magazine to sell at high school. At age 18 a few of my hobbies, like writing, layout design and playing around with photoshop, would all come to great use once I got introduced to the Internet. That was the perfect platform to integrate all those hobbies with my passion for music.
The first website was launched, a fansite for MN8 (later the official website for this pop group), and that was the birth of a webdesign company. Many websites followed, but also logos, flyers, articles, interviews and so much more. That I wasn't able to just sit down and keep still seemed to be a great asset to the company, as well as my interest in many creative things.
In the first few years I mainly worked on websites about artists, musical, theatre productions and companies that would somehow be linked to the entertainment business. At times I would combine my work for my company with part time jobs as webmaster or webdesigner. This introduced me to the world of local politics, health care and telecom, which affected my company. My assignments started to descent the music business.
In the meantime webdesigning became serious work. Standards were introduced, as well as official education on the matter, more scripting languages, systems that would allow people to maintain their own websites and I got a little older along the way. I started having different priorities. I wanted to use the time I was spending on keeping up with all that was happening on the Internet for other things. I found myself not enjoying my work anymore especially as it had drifted far off from the music scene. After 15 years, in 2011, it became time to close shop and find a new challenge. This website shows you (and me) what I've been doing all those years.
