Leonardo Vasconcellos — First Website

Screenshots

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Overview

This was Leonardo's first footprint on the web — a bilingual personal website hand-built in 2007, before GitHub existed as a portfolio platform and before "personal brand" entered the developer lexicon. He assembled it in raw HTML and CSS because he had already shipped enough client work to need a showcase, and because the most direct way to have a website is to build one.

Bilingual from day one. The site runs in both English and Portuguese via parallel directory trees (en/ and br/), each with mirrored page structures and a shared design system. No i18n libraries, no build steps — just clean structural separation that let Brazilian and international clients navigate in their own language. The bilingual requirement was built into the architecture from the start, not bolted on after.

A live catalogue of client work. The portfolio section documents every production system Leonardo had shipped by 2007: custom PHP/MySQL CMS platforms built for clients who needed to manage their own content without technical staff; an e-commerce system with full inventory management, boleto bancário payment integration, and Google-powered search; an email marketing engine (Reacher WebMailer) with audience segmentation, a WYSIWYG template editor, and CRON-scheduled batch sends that delivered personalised emails — not mass blasts — to stay out of spam filters; a government social-welfare records system (Secretaria do Bem Estar Social) replacing paper files with digital family registries, programme tracking, and HTML-based printed reports; and a web analytics tool adapted from open source and extended with Brazilian regional geographic data.

Most entries credit sole authorship: design, analysis, and implementation by Leonardo. For clients, that meant one point of contact from brief to deployment — leaner projects with no handoffs, no version mismatches, and no communication overhead between designer and developer.

A complete professional history. The resume section reads like a systems engineer's origin story: Windows NT network administration starting in 1996, Linux (Conectiva official courses), Oracle, SQL Server, ASP, MacOS X server configuration at Quantic Solutions, an Oracle/SSI B2B system for Franke Douat, and four years of independent web development. His MCP certification (Microsoft Certified Professional, Windows NT4) dated to 2000 — when many developers his age were still learning HTML.

The design itself. Black background, #00FF00 green body text, hover states in acid yellow. It was 2007, and the aesthetic was deliberate — terminal palette, maximum contrast, no rounded corners, no gradients. The layout was table-based (the correct cross-browser approach before CSS positioning was reliable), with image-sliced headers and a Microsoft IE shadow filter for depth. A technically correct implementation of the web as it existed at the time.

Highlights