HITEMUP.CO.UK was founded by myself in September 1998, when I was 17 I had left school and had decided to go to Llandrillo College in Rhos, for those of you that don't know where that is it is in Wales, which is where I live.  Whilst I was in Llandrillo I was studying GNVQ Foundation IT which is the lowest level you could possibly start from, Starting at this level was my own fault really as not paying attention during my time at secondary school helped me walk out with very little in the qualifications department so off to Llandrillo it was to study computers.  Before my time in Llandrillo I had never personally been on the Internet let alone think about creating a web site on it but this was about to change in a very short space of time.

After a few months at Llandrillo when things had started to calm down and the tutors had decided what students were going to last the year we were split up into to separate groups, This would turn out to change my opinions on various things as for the past few months I had gone from starting In College with no friends to starting to make a few there to being taken into the office and told that I was being put into the group 2 of 2 groups.  Not only did I not no anyone at all from group 2 but I was basically told that I would not good enough to pass the course and I was put in group 2 for this reason, yet a day earlier when we were all told about the grouping system we were told that there would be no favouritism, no offence to people that I was in with but basically Group 2 was all the lower achievers.

This would mark the change in me personally as I decided that I was going to prove my tutor wrong and pass my course and make him wish that he would never have moved me down to the lower course which I did passing the course with an overall Distinction and moving straight up to the Advanced level the next year missing out on the Intermediate level.  Anyway after the grouping system had been put in place we were all given a list of additional courses that we would be doing throughout the year and one of the additional courses that I decided to take on a Website Design course In which we all had to create a website and show it off in a presentation at the end of the year.  Personally I really was not interested in the Internet at this point of the course I had never been on it and why should it appeal to me I was far to busy with the newly found e-mail to be wanting to even consider the Internet!

I walked into my first Website Design course not expecting to be blown away by anything I just thought we would be writing down a few things about ourselves and then typing them up onto the computer just plain black and white! During the lesson we were told we had an hour to browse the Internet but we all had to start by using a search engine all we had to do was type a subject in and a list of websites would appear, Being a Tupac fan since I was 12 made the choice quite easy for me, at this point I really didn't no that much about Tupac I just had all his albums and listened to his music and lyrics I didn't know about the man and all the struggles he made it through during his life.  After looking at a few sites we were told that we would be creating a website on any subject of our liking, it didn't even take me a second to decide what I was going to do mine on.

After a few lessons and a few hours browsing the internet I had found many Tupac sites but unfortunately most of them sucked and only consisted of two or three pages I had decided that my site was going to have as much information on it as I could find and had typed most of the content already.  Another thing I noticed was that alot of the sites had just been copying and pasting all the information from each others websites, now I am not going to deny that this site is 100% written myself but I have always e-mailed the website owners for use of pictures or information.  As I just stated above I had typed alot of Information and already had it in black and white now all I needed to do was turn that Information into a website!

Once all the information had been acquired I then needed to learn HTML which I did slowly and surely over the next six to twelve months, I must have created 15 to 20 different sites thinking that all of them were a vast improvement on the last, but I had still not come across anything that I thought was out of the ordinary and that could have the possibility of being one of the best Tupac sites on the Internet. But I reluctantly added my site onto the Internet via Freeservers which is a free website company that allows you to post your website on the Internet for free but they have there banner across the top of your site but for my first site on the Internet I was very happy with it. Whilst my site was online I decided to call it In Hiz Own Words and the site was doing quite well on Tupac's Top 40 I managed to get it within the top 50 consecutively every week which might not sound that good but at that point I had not added my site to Search Engines as I did not understand about meta tags.

Sadly I decided to stop working In Hiz Own Words in the summer of 2000 as I had a lads holiday to organise and various other things were taking up my time so I left my website time for about six months.  When I came back from holiday I decided that things needed to be changed on my site so a whole new site design was created hoping to attract more people to view the site, I worked on the meta tags on the site and also added my site to as many search engines as I could find so that once the site was on the net it would already be on most of the major search engines ready for people to find.  As it was a whole new start for my website I decided to rename the site from In Hiz Own Words to Paconline and I can say that Paconline took my website skills to the next level.

Paconline was officially uploaded in 2001 and can still be found online at www.paconline.8m.com although I have not uploaded anything to the site for a few years I decided to leave it online as I managed to receive a few web awards for all my hard work over the previous three years.  Paconline did do alot better and managed to get a hell of alot more hits than what I previously managed with web In Hiz Own Words but I still knew my site should have been doing alot better than it was.  The was only one thing I could do and that was either get a .co.uk address or a .com address so that's what I decided to do in early 2003.  Over the last 6 months or so a fair few Paconline or variation sites had found there way onto the Internet so I decided once again to change the name of the site and also have yet another site design this time one that would really stand out from the rest and hopefully get my site recognised, and along came HITEMUP.CO.UK.

Way back when I had started creating my site the original version had been called HIT EM UP 2 as there was already a site on the Internet called Hit Em Up but during it's first week I had a really long e-mail from the webmaster of Hitemup.com basically saying that my site sucked and there was only one Hitemup website on the Internet and that was his, instead of arguing the fact this time I just changed the name of the site to In Hiz Own Words, This time however I thought bollocks to whatever anyone else thinks yes Hitemup.com is the best Tupac site on the Internet but that does not give them the right to stop me calling my site HITEMUP so that was that the new site was born HITEMUP.CO.UK is here and I am hoping that it is so for a long time to come there is an unbelievable amount of information already posted on the site and there is much more for me to upload and write out so I am hoping that this site is a massive improvement on those that came before it and that is already happening as the site is not yet complete and I am being given website awards left right and centre!

I do really think there is something here for all Tupac fans new or old so please take your time and have a good look around the site and please leave your comments for me to read in the Guestbook.

Stuart Parry
Webmaster