After I had given birth to my baby girl back in 2001, I remember that apart from being overwhelmed by the experience, I had a lot of friends and family that we needed to inform. It was an incredibly disorganised affair, due to the fact that I had to have an emergency caesarian and was kept in hospital for 5 days (something I wasn’t banking on at all!)
Paul, my husband was ‘responsible’ for announcing to our gang of the great news. Being pretty much ‘OK’ with computer technology, he scanned the photos and emailed them to our parents, friends and other family members… only to crash everyone’s computer on the outset!
The reason for that? Oh yes, our ‘techie’ hubby had only gone and scanned the photograph at HIGH resolution (about 600dpi) giving each image a whopping 40megabytes!
As you can understand, not many people received their photos, and if they did, they had to wait…. and wait….. and wait….. until it finally appeared on their screens. After that, their PCs would crash from the massive amount of memory the images required!
When baby and I returned from hospital, it was my job to put matters right and also apologising for the technical mishap- gulp!
So, instead of sending more JPEGs, I created a simple website containing the new photos and emailed all my friends and family to say..”baby is here, come and look”. The only doubt I had in my mind was that ALL kinds of people could find my baby’s website – and that’s NOT what I wanted at all.
I wanted a website where I could upload my pictures, share them with friends and family and password protect it from ‘undesirebles’. But could I find any online service like that at the time? No! This was 2001, remember. Only a small number of sites catered for this kind of thing, but none of them were secure – and if they were, they charged a huge amount of money for the privelage.
A year later, BabyHedgehog was born. But why the name ‘BabyHedgehog’? Well, I was trading under my design company, Hedgehog Design Ltd at the time. And being ever mindful of ‘brand identity’, I was inspired by Richard Branson, in a way and tried to create a global brand experience… yawn! Anyway, I was thinking wider and more globally than I would normally. Oh come on, you can’t tell me that you haven’t thought that way yourselves, haven’t you?
Well, today after messing about with ‘branding’, ideas, java-script (God help us!) and now ASP (for the web dev fraternity), BabyHedgehog has grown into more than just an online baby photo album.
I still use mine, you know.
I’ve kept a month by month photographic library of her development for all these years. Nobody can give those memories back to you. And I urge you, if you are a parent to keep photographic or video records of your children because it’s true… they DO grow up SO fast!!
