This month we celebrate MNWD’s 16th Birthday. It is a milestone for us and we want to thank all of you who have been a part our journey so far. We love what we do and really enjoy helping our clients grow their businesses through internet marketing.

A brief history for those interested

A womanly launch Melissa started MNWD as an "on-the-side" project in February 1998. She was working for the University of Melbourne at the time as Web & Multimedia Manager in the Electronic Engineering Department. Recently engaged, she had a wedding and first home to save up for. She started off building a website for her Mum who had not long started her own business. At the time not many businesses had their own website but the internet was really taking off! Melissa's mum joined a women's networking group in the Doncaster/Templestowe area. Some of the women saw her website and asked who built in, including the organiser of the networking group. Melissa started helping a few of these women to get online after hours and on weekends and word of mouth started to spread.

In June 2002 Melissa quit her day job and Melissa Norfolk Web Design became a full time venture. At this time she already had 50 regular clients. In November 2002, she put her first staff member, her sister, Chloe Norfolk, who worked as a part time admin assistant while she was a university student. In January 2004, she hired part-time trainee web designer, Heather Winchcomb who many of you would remember as she was with us for 4 years.

In September 2004, our first full time web designer, Matthew Baulch joined the team. Matt worked with us for 18 months and then took off travelling with his then girl friend (now wife) Bec for 2 years in the US & Canada. We were lucky to have him return to work with us in 2008 when Melissa had her first child and he has been our Business/Operations Manager for the past 5 years.

In 2006, MNWD moved from a home office in Greensborough to our current commercial office in Doncaster Road, Balwyn North.

In 2007, we won the 2007 Australian Achiever Award, achieving a 99.70% overall score for Customer Service and Relations.

We have been lucky to have many great people on our team including Chloe, Heather, Matthew, Conan, Tim, Anthony, Corine, Kylie, Eadaoin and of course Sjet who has been with us 4 years now.

We service more than 450 clients now and are lucky to have many loyal clients/friends who have been with us 12+ years.

Scarely there has also been many businesses close down over this time so we feel lucky to still be in business and doing what love. Here's to the next 16 years~

Our logo over time

2005-2014 2002-2005 1998-2001

Our website over time

1998 - 2000

Our first website was a very basic static html website built using tables, it even had an animated GIF email icon!

http://web.archive.org/web/20000816031041/http://www.melissanorfolk.net.au/

2002-2004

In 2002, we had our logo redrawn and picked our corporate colours blue and orange which we still use today. Our website was rebuilt to match our new corporate colours and to be a bit more professional. It is a wider design showing that screens were increasing in size. we had started to use rollovers on the buttons, fill in forms, email marketing and affiliate marketing - wow very high tech :)

http://web.archive.org/web/20020525061211/http://www.melissanorfolk.net.au/

2004-2005

Only a slight facelift! We were going through a period of growth and too busy building everyone else's website to spend much time on our own :(

2005-2008

In 2005, web rebranded and overhauled our website. It included drop-down menus, rotating banners and was built specifically to make use of and show off our SEO skills. We had a dramatic increase in website traffic after this website went online.