"I launched BuySellAds.com because I was frustrated. I had two web design related sites I was running as a hobby and I was selling ads on these sites. The entire process of getting advertisers, managing payment terms & methods, and keeping track of when to put ads up and when to take them down, etc. was entirely frustrating and inefficient. So, I decided to start BuySellAds.com to solve my problems."

"This is embarrassing but the very first time I used Photoshop was because I wanted a wallpaper with a gorgeous girl on it, and oddly I couldn’t find any I liked. So I asked my flatmate who was in design school and he showed me how to use the pen tool to cut stuff out, and then I was hooked."

"I read up on search engine optimization, I understand concepts of PageRank, linking, and so on, but to be honest I never really bothered with it too much beyond some of the more basic techniques. I figure that if I spend more time building a quality site, more people will link to it."

"Abduzeedo started in the end of 2006. My office had been robbed and I had lost my computer and all my backups for the past 6 months of work. It was really tough and I had lots of experimental works in my computer, all of which were lost. I then decided to start a blog to promote myself and backup my experimental work, which became the tutorials I do now."

"In late 2007, a good friend and I started talking about building another similar site, originally with the name “Photo9″, but during our conversation we decided that we should give it room to expand in the future – appropriately naming it Tutorial9 (in homage to the Phrase Cloud9)."

"In 2000, there was no place for artists to put their artwork online. DeviantArt was founded by a programmer, an artist, and an entrepreneur. I would be the entrepreneur."

"The idea was to develop a credit based system where I could trade images with other photographers and designers. The deal was simple, if you downloaded an image, the photographer who shot the image was given a credit to download another image."

"Pixel2life.com actually began as a personal portfolio site I was designing while recovering from a serious bout of food poisoning. I was working out quite a bit at the time and had zero plans for taking on any new web design projects since my fairly complete retirement in 2002."

"FWA evolved in to a business after about six years in existence, mainly as I was getting a lot of advertising enquiries and traffic was going crazy. It was a natural progression."

"It is important that more designers realize that usable and functional web-sites build the foundation of successful web-sites. Gorgeous design can wait. We, at Smashingmagazine.com, still don’t have it. We’re not sure we’ll ever have."