So what to do in Denmark when no sunshine and howling winds at times. Well, one day I found myself inside a kite shop. Or rather a shop also selling kites.

The shop carries a good range of kites. From el cheapo ones to more advanced and expensive ones. I went for a couple of kites from the lower end of the price range.

Both kites flew in the Danish winds, but back at home things were different. No such winds as in Denmark. The Internet became the solution. Because there was more to kiting than cheap kites from China.

I got in contact with Øystein Høyland, a Norwegian kite enthusiast with his own webshop. Soon I was the owner of a Session and Obsession from HQ Kites.

A little later Anders Matson introduced himself and added another dimension to my kiting. So the snowball kept on rolling and the rest is history.

The Internet has played a very important role in my – and others too – kiting life. That’s where I got hold of all kind of information living in the far outskirts of the international kiting world. I used Internet myself to engage and for many fellow liters the AERIALIS.DOT.COM became a benchmark.

I started out with experimenting using free website providers overloaded with commercial adds and whatnots.

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Here are a couple of screen dumps of my website – Kiting in Norway and the AERIALIS Kite Club – from way back in 1999.

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But after a couple of years I bought the domain aerialis.com and aerialis.no and started to work on the portal.

In 2000 the first result hit the ”net looking something like this…

I used Dreamweaver for building this website and it’s nice template feature. The website was built up by using these templates and improved updating. Based on the number of views I recon my fellow kiters were happy with the website as well!

The next couple of years I dived into the world of PHP-programming and SQL-databases. I was determined to make use of these tools both improving the website itself but also simplifying maintenance procedures. I worked pretty intensively for quite some time and finally I was ready to launch the next version with a whole lot of neat, interactive functions like my backend admin panel and front end functionality drastically increasing interactivity.

…and the website now looked something like this…

As time passed I was so fortunate to attend the Freestyle World Cup in Cap d’Agde with the AERIALIS Team Flyers and meeting all the kiters in real life. I also found that my website was vary popular among them. 😉

At work I was handed the responsibility for the company website and it was running on the XOOPS CMS and based on my experience with the CMS I decided to transfer AERIALIS-DOT-COM to that CMS as well. After a short period of tweaking and tuning it was ready to go and it looked something like this…

My kite portal ran on XOOPS for the next four years. But for a reason I cannot remember right now I decided to switch to another CMS. I first tried WordPress, but was far from impressed. I found another one – Light’n’Easy – that I found a better option. IIRC the CMC cam in two versions, one flat filed and one using an MySQL database. I chose the latter and divided my website into sections:

• AERIALIS World
• AERIALIS Norge (Norway)
• AERIALIS DrageShop (Kite shop)
• AERIALIS Team Flyers
• Nordic Kite Challenge

…and the homepage looked like this…

For the next years I kind of faded away from kiting. My daughter became very involved with her showjumping and to cater for two, three showjumping ponies takes it’s time. 😉

The whole family was caught into a new way of life, a life with horses with all the challenges that brings. Learned a lot though, and wouldn’t have missed it for the world!

However, I packed the kite bags and headed for the Nordic Kite Meeting in Denmark every year to fly some kites and hang out with the best kite buddies. I also managed to switch CMS for my kite website again. The Light’n’Easy was kind of not supported anymore and now I found WordPress very useful.

Playing around with it for a while I ended up with this…

It’s still running on WordPress and I’ve taken quantum leaps in my WordPress knowledge. I have included the Elementor page builder and it’s very powerful functions one of my main design tools and made a completely new look for the website.

I’ve also found a bit of spare time to go flying kites and hopefully it will stay like that for a while. That means frequent updates to the site that now looks like this…

So…. twenty years after it all started on that wind swept Danish beach, I’m still flying, I’m still having fun on the Internet with my websites and I’m still enjoying beach bumming and flying with my kite buddies.

Could one ask for more?!!

Hey, I just tweaked the website front page and it now (September 14th) looks like this…