About me
Who am I?
My name is Bram Van der Sype. I’m a young student from Belgium. In my spare time I develop websites for a broad public and am able to suit almost anyone’s need. From the painter who wants just a small portfolio to the business man who needs a company website with a fully operational backend.
I started playing with HTML when I was thirteen — frames and font tags, those were the days. Today I’m 21 and I have added xHTML, CSS and PHP to that list. At the moment, I’m also mucking about with jQuery, the javascript framework and CodeIgniter, a PHP framework which has made developing websites a lot easier.
What’s this site about?
Bramme.net exists mainly to promote my work and get some attention. It was meant to be my portfolio all along. Bramme.net however is also my personal site. I maintain a small blog here, where I mainly post snippets of code or write a small tutorial.
A little history
“Bramme” used to be my nickname when I was younger. Five years ago I decided I wanted to start my own website and I started off with bramme.com. My first websites were simple html pages with even simpler designs, though I had a few Photoshop tutorials and I got a decent amount of visitors. After a while it became clear I couldn’t keep using html only and started working with someone else who did my PHP. Contact faded and the bramme.com domain name expired. Even worse, it got registered by someone else and gone was my website. It took me a year to get bramme.net online, learning PHP along the way, determined to “code my own site”! While my personal site was offline, I tried starting a blog over at wordpress.com but I never really put a lot of effort in it.
The first bramme.net was launched in january 2007. I wanted to skip on the bloggin trend train and use my site as a portfolio at the same time. The site never got really finished and was kept online for a few months with limited blogging capabilities and no portfolio. In april 2007 I was contacted to do my first big website (AmA-Wellness). The client naturally wanted to see a portfolio first, but I couldn’t provide anything. I decided it was time to change something and switched over to WordPress, then thinking it would be a quick fix, publishing some things online and then work on my own coded site again.
Today, september 2008, more then a year later, I’m still on WordPress. I got attached to it. I like it, it’s easy to maintain and let’s me focus on other, more important, things. The theme you’re now looking at is an updated version of the first bramme.net WordPress theme.