Ahh, the good old days. In 1997/98 I created a website for my hometown with photos, cinema schedule and the like. I "designed" it Coral Draw und Adobe GoLive. It was a time when you were hip if you used tables for the layout. And if you used Server Side Includes, you were quite the hacker.

My first real web development project was an appointment scheduler. In 2000 a potential client wanted one but we couldn't license one from the only company that offered that kind of software at the time in Germany. Thus I taught myself PHP and MySQL and within a week I had a working prototype. Users could reserve appointments and admins could manage them.

The deal with the potential client fell through, though, but I continued working on the code. It was hard going because back in the day, there were no PHP frameworks (that I knew of) and no CSS frameworks.

It's been moderately successful and I still have happy customers from that time. I only wish I had done early on what I did two years ago: offer it as a hosted service (or SaaS, as it is now called).