While waiting for the water to boil for tea, I sit and think about the past days when I was involved in website creation. I wasn’t some expert, like some people are, but even my modest knowledge of WordPress, along with two e-commerce platforms, X-Cart and PrestaShop, produced very acceptable results—sometimes even excellent ones.
I also dabbled a bit in “ripping” websites. Admittedly, not much, and it was only when I was just starting out.
I’d land a job, find a site I liked from that business field, download it to my PC in HTML format using software, and tweak it. It’s somewhat similar to when a beat-up car comes to a mechanic—he patches it up, straightens the metal, fills in the dents, replaces the rusted edges, paints it, and “in no time” turns an old wreck into a beauty.
Okay, maybe the comparison isn’t quite spot-on, because in my case, with those HTML files, I’d change a few things—adjust some tags, edit the text inside them, and update links to images and other HTML pages for the site I was working on. I’d make sure not to miss any links and leave them unchanged, because once the site was done, one wrong click could send someone to the original site I’d reworked for “my” purposes.
Note: Clicking on the images gives you the full homepages of the sites, which are too large to display within this article. Here, you only see the thumbnails.
Now I’ll present a good chunk of what I worked on, so it doesn’t get forgotten, because I’m somewhat proud of that part of my career. Some sites are no longer online, and some clients replaced them with slightly better ones, to be honest, made by other web designers or even companies.
This might be the most complex site I ever worked on. Late 2017. At the time, I was doing video surveillance with a neighbor, and since he had a long-standing partnership with AMS Electronic from Niš, I had the idea to sell their products through my site. It was tricky to pull off, and in the end, I sold the finished site to the company owner (he liked it more than his previous one), so my effort wasn’t in vain. The site was never put into use by that company. Update: I’ve relaunched the original website, and it can now be viewed again on the link above as a demo.
Made for a cousin who was into bodybuilding, way back in 2013. One of the first sites I did. E-commerce platform X-Cart 4. The site was in use for many years and is the most successful one I made. Excellent SEO optimization of titles and my cousin’s resourcefulness in finding reliable suppliers brought this site to 3rd place in Serbia on Google for supplement sales at one point. The site hasn’t been active for a few years. Shame I didn’t take more screenshots. It looked solid and had over 200 products. Update: I’ve relaunched the website, and it can now be viewed again on its original domain.
The third one shown is the last one I did, for a friend who owns a driving school. Not much to say—decent job. The interesting part of the site is the blog. One of the school’s instructors regularly added content and enriched the site that way. The site is active. Click the link to visit it.
This is the previous site for the same friend, when he had a different company. An earlier work and a bit simpler than the current one. It’s available as an exhibit on my hosting—click the link if you want to see it.
A time when I had pretty good cooperation with what’s now a reputable company, Crossbike, a subsidiary of the Bulgarian bicycle manufacturing and sales company Cross, operating in Serbia and beyond. Two years ago, they made a new site. The version I worked on is shown here—I translated the Bulgarian site into Serbian, set it up on hosting, and maintained it for several years.
crossbike.rs/shop
A separate site for selling bikes, since the main one, shown earlier, only had the ability to display bikes and their features. Now they have a unified site with more options. This one, naturally, is no longer in use as a result.
velosiped.rs
Another job for Crossbike. My task was to translate their entire Bulgarian site—an online store—into Serbian and set it up on their hosting. As I recall, there were over 350 items! The result was a copy of the Bulgarian site in Serbian. Crossbike imported their parts from Bulgaria and handled sales. The platform was Magento, which I had no experience with. I struggled with the translation and picked up a feel for Bulgarian along the way :). The site is no longer active.
Through a strange set of circumstances, I got in touch with the son of the owner of Megatrend University in Serbia, for whom I made this site. I visited the water factory on that occasion. A few years later, Mića Jovanović sold the factory, and this site was shut down. I really liked it, so I put it on my hosting as a demo exhibit. You can see it by clicking the link.
zoranradmilovic.org.rs
The theater in Zaječar got me as a recommendation from someone I can’t quite recall, to build their site back in 2014. It might seem odd, but they had a very modest budget. The good thing was that after building the site, I updated its content weekly for maybe a year. The site was bilingual. A few years later, they let the domain expire, and someone else made them a new site on a different domain.
A young guy moved to Zaječar from Niš because of his wife, opened a travel agency, and needed a site. He Googled and stumbled upon my site. He was very fair, and best of all, I had regular work updating the content for years. I was happy with the payments. It was only when I got into something else and stopped doing websites around mid-2018 that I stopped maintaining his site.
A recommendation from the Crossbike owner led to this site. Protim is currently a pretty solid company and does a lot of work. Fair collaboration and the occasional coffee with relaxed chats with the owner are what I remember—oh, and I mentioned wanting to go to Norway. They’re relatively close to where I lived in Zaječar.
Facebook played a role here too. A guy contacted me through my page. Turns out we knew each other from high school. Sadly, one of the dying family businesses in Serbia. His dad is a furrier and wool processor, while he mostly deals with selling leather. Thanks to the bilingual site, he started working with people abroad. I believe I helped breathe a bit of life back into this business.
Facebook again. A travel agency across from the elementary school near the center of Zaječar. I later went to that same agency multiple times to buy insurance when I was heading to Sweden and then Norway. The owner’s brother lives in Norway :). The guy quickly became a “web designer” himself—check out the result by clicking the link. Let’s just say I’d approach it differently if I didn’t know something.
Another site born from collaboration between a Bulgarian and a Zaječar company. I didn’t exactly get a copy of the site to translate into Serbian, but I “manually” found the WordPress theme of the original site and made almost everything look like the original, as needed. I grabbed text from the original, translated it, and uploaded images to the Serbian version, swapping some out for nicer ones. The site is only available as a demo here.
Early 2014. One of my first sites. For a real estate agency, I also maintained their computer alongside the site. I tried teaching them how to add properties themselves, but it didn’t do much good. After a few years with no contact, they wanted me to work on the site again and got upset when I quoted a slightly higher price. By then, I was already working on bigger projects, and… you get the reason. The site’s different now (in my opinion, worse than it was).
Deal made through my Facebook page. I didn’t meet the guy until after I built the site, when I went to Negotin for another job (installing video surveillance). Lots of phone chats about all sorts of things related to the site. Honestly, I couldn’t wait to finish it. On the flip side, the guy’s pretty good at his job. There was one tiny design issue I never fixed—luckily, it’s not noticeable.
This is a weird story. The guy found me through my site. He showed up in a funny leather jacket and an old Nissan. A short guy named Rochester. Lives in Switzerland and does something related to healthcare statistics. He asked for a price, I said 40 euros because that’s how I sized him up—it was one of my earlier jobs. A few years later, I was doing video surveillance in the village of Dubočane for a guy who was his neighbor. Long story short, Rochester has two huge houses in his yard, found a pot of gold on his property, and basically has a ton of money.
Another job for a guy originally from Dubočane. The idea was to showcase his village, Zaječar, and nearby places on one site. It had a lot of photo galleries and some info about them I pulled from Wikipedia. I sold him the idea—the site had a blog and forum, meant to bring together people from abroad to participate, but it never took off. The site’s not functional, just like the previous one. I think he personally tried to do something with both and messed them up in the process. Update: I’ve relaunched the original website, and it can now be viewed on the link above as a demo.
Honestly, I can’t quite remember this one—it’s like a blur. I saw emails from correspondence with the guy I did this for, but it feels like someone else made it. Who knows what state I was in when I was busy with this—not drunk or anything like that. I just see it’s not the same now as when I made it.
All done in a week at most. From the first contact via my site to handing over all the files to the client after I finished. The guy’s brother, for whom I did this, has a good hostel, and this was sort of a gift to help his business. It’s been tweaked a bit, not too professionally from what I can see.
milantosic.com
The only Flash site I ever made, and it was quite a while ago. A friend and neighbor, a bodybuilder hyped about the USA, specifically Miami, wanted to be a personal trainer. Seems it worked out for him for a while. I couldn’t host it as a demo since Flash isn’t supported online anymore.
One negative experience. A cousin of my friend with a story that didn’t hold water, generally speaking. I heard all sorts of things from him—rarely anything true. After building the site, I waited a while for payment that never came. Good thing I didn’t invest too much time. I put it up as a demo—it never served its purpose.
I spent quite a while fixing computers in Zaječar on my own. For a time, I also serviced computers in some banks in and around Zaječar for a company called SMART from Belgrade. If the phrase “on the wild side” means anything to you, you get what I’m talking about. Still, the site I made ranked first in Zaječar search results for a while 🙂 It’s HTML. You can check it out—it’s up as a demo.
Another site on a free .iz.rs domain, this time for my wife, a professional physiotherapist. Back then, her work was more of a hobby to get out of the house and do something. Now she works at a more serious level, a different job, and in another country. There were occasional calls from tourists in Zaječar who thought she had a massage salon when they saw the site. They were mistaken 🙂 It’s up as a demo.
Back when I was also doing video surveillance, a guy who made keys contacted me. My colleague from the surveillance gig also did key-cutting on the side. Site creation plus some computer maintenance. Everything was fair. A somewhat sad fate, which I won’t get into here. His son took over the business, and since he didn’t reach out to renew, the domain expired. The site’s hosted here as a demo.
I’d known the guy for a long time—he was the first to pay me for fixing a computer. Before that, I’d just do system installs for free around the neighborhood, but I found that work interesting too. After I started maintaining a few computers for him, we soon agreed on a site. I think it was the second or third one I did. Let’s just say there’s no reason for it to still be active, but it’s here as an exhibit.
The first site I ever made. I had the idea to showcase a plot of land we were selling. I figured there’d be a better chance of selling it if it had its own site instead of just being listed as an ad. I was right, in a way. Some guy called my dad and bought the plot, but AFTER 4 YEARS of the site being up. It’s HTML, a very simple template, free domain and hosting. Before this, I had a Google blog site where I properly wasted time in late 2010. That served as practice and inspiration to even start down this path.
This is pretty much everything I did in this field. There were a couple of other minor, uninteresting jobs I didn’t feel like mentioning. Once, I even acted as a tutor for an astrologer. He wanted to learn how to make a Google blog. In the end, he stuck to astrology :).
After this chapter, a new and much more lucrative one began for me—eBay sales. But that’s for another time.
