Domain
A Personal Site by Rilla
appassionato adj. passionate. [Italian]
From being just a design site displaying my passion in the field of web design over the course of four years, Appassionato in 2007 turned into a personal site incorporating my blog, personal profile, mini portfolio and also a resources section aiming to retain that designs and tutorials section the old site offered.
If there were ever reasons other than just being spontaneous, ignore me, it’s all just laziness it must be the increasing school workload over the years, meaning less leisure time, meaning less devotion to maintaining a pure design site.
But to put it in a more “sophisticated” way, expression can come in two forms: words and art; and I have grown to love both. Thus, the new Appassionato acts as my virtual connection to the wider world, a way for me to release my various emotions and thoughts. In expressing myself, I believe I’m also letting the wider world connect to the person deep down inside. It is this two-way connection I value more than just being a popular resources provider.
Brief History
I started off with a personal site in late 2002 and co-owned a graphics site with two other school friends. However, co-ownership imposed many restrictions and conflicts. In the end, the site was closed and while my two friends decided to stick to their own blogs, I went on with providing graphic resources and proceeded deeper into this so-called “web design community”.
On 17 February 2003, Appassionato was launched as a design site, providing a wide range of free graphics, layouts and tutorials. I believe at one point Appassionato was one of the most popular graphics resources website for young people, with an average of more than 1,000 unique visitors per day. (That was massive at the time!) Gradually, I became frustrated with being hosted as a subdomain by irresponsible hosts that deleted all my content without warning so in February 2004, the domain wildx.org was bought and has since acted as the home of my design arena.
When I finished high school and tertiary studies begun in February 2007, I made the “grave” decision to close Appassionato as a design site. And during the mid-year school break in June 2007, I got my arse back on track with Appassionato and here it is now, my personal expressive zone of Rilla’s bits and pieces.
Appassionato vs wildx.org
The background behind the inconsistency between the site name Appassionato and the chosen domain URL wildx.org is a complicated story. The site name is in Italian. By the time I finally decided on purchasing my own domain, I have accepted that a vast majority of the visiting population have trouble spelling the name off by heart. Hence if I was to use the site name as the URL, my visitors would be getting lost.
And if I was to change the site name?
At one point I considered changing the name to Wintry Passion or Wild Passion (corny I know, I was 15!). I thought they were too long however, so I shortened Wild Passion to a simple “wildx”. Further down the path, I realised I had grown attached to the original name Appassionato and on the other hand, it was inconvenient to change links and to put it in commercial terms, I’d be giving up the goodwill attached to the name.
The final result is a permanent discrepancy between the site name and the URL. However, it just goes to show that the domain has this history unique to itself. Unless of course, if you really think I should get appassionato.org or something, let me know. I might consider. Not. 
Technicalities
The domain is hosted on a reseller hosting account with Scala Hosting (I highly recommend it for reliability and support!), and the domain name is currently registered with Namecheap (cheap and amazing). My website tracking and analytics application of top preference is Clicky.
