WebmasterWorld's confessional.

The only way to repent is to confess first

[Macguru]

OK, here it goes.

I made my first site at no charge for practical training at the end of a course. It was for a broke local glass artist association. It used frames and had a counter on home page. We had 30 000 visitors in 2 years.

I feel better now.

Who's turn is it?

[EliteWeb]

My first site was put onto a AOL account which is still active and online ;)

<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Adobe PageMill 2.0 Mac">

Overviewing the HTML I have 2 body tags ;)

A JavaScript Timer

HTML Before my Header Closed

And a Broken Formmail that never worked.

oOoo and text with upper-case-lower-case 'MissOlaNiOuS LiNkS:' hahah but i thiNK I still do that ;)

[jeremy goodrich]

I page jacked my business 101 class in college. The professor was boring, so was the material - so I learned HTML and got a user account on the undergrad *nix system.

Uploaded my 'test', I edited between tags with text that said, "this does what?"

After that, I decided I needed to make a personal home page - don't ask why. I'll never, ever do such a thing again. It was terrible, I scanned a silly pic in, and made up a bunch of cr@p.

Come to think of it, I had a counter as well :) I kept refreshing the screen and then I told my friends, "hey look -> I got XXX number of visitors".

That was fun. I wanna hear more. he he. I am glad that site disappeared from the search engines a few years ago - things only live for so long on the internet before fading away...

[Mike12345]

I was one of those annoying kids who hangs around at warez sites. :(

But im clean now, honestly.

:)

[Nick_W]

My first site was an mp3 site that used tables and font tags liberally. I feel so ashamed...

Nick

[4eyes]

My first site was an aromatherapy site for my wife.

It weighed in about 120k per page and had mouse over buttons that were bl**dy massive.

I'm sorry - I'm really sorry

[mavherick]

My first one had a little message at the bottom that said "Optimized for ..."

I changed, I swear!

mavherick

[edit_g]

I set up a BBS when I was 13 called... Er... Sweet Leaf... It was all about the sweetness of leaves... Yes... Quite.

I still think ANSI graphics are cool! :)

[Brett_Tabke]

My first page crashed netscape 2.1(?) under win 3.1. I put it on the web anyway because I couldn't figure out what was wrong. I'd accidently left two title tags in the page. It ranked #1 on alta for almost a year. The rest - as they say - is history.

[bateman_ap]

God, my first site was one for a gin brand. Was so chuffed I managed to run text round a picture, god help me if i dig out the code for that, it will be hidious!

God knows how many years ago that was, remember though was spending more time on FirstClass BBS's (anyone remember those) than on the web proper.

[Marketing Guy]

I was forced to hand code a small site for an assignment at Uni.

My tutor felt that my suggestion of a comprehensive business guide for the local area was a bit much for a newbie to achieve in under 4 weeks.

He suggested that I just created an online CV like everyone else... :)

For some reason he was adament that we should all have photos on our CVs?!?

I think I ended up using a photo of Homer Simpson....which was commented on in his markings (and I think reflected in my grade to....).

But dammit - for 1999 I was top on Google for my own name! :)

Dam baseball players...

Scott :)

[creative craig]

My first page you had to scroll at least a for a minute to get to the bottom...

wait that was last week ;)

[added]I got problems with baseball players using my name as well scott :)[/added]

[xcandyman]

Forgive me WebmasterWorld for I have sinned!

My first site was an awful mess back in the days when someone said internet someone else said interwha?

In fact some people still do :)

I had huge images that took forever to load on 14,400 modem and I must admit I had red text on black background.

I am a changed man I promise!

Steve

[mykel]

One of my first sites was about a celebrity. Had about 10 pics of her on the page, of course without thumbnails. Oh, and a small table on top and bottom with invisible text and keywords repeated about a hundred time. But heck, it worked! :) That got me wondering if I would do that again if it did stil work. Guess I'm not ready to repent...

[korkus2000]

My first site was a project for college. I went to art school and everyone was sculpting and painting for the project. I thought I would think outside the box and do one of these new fangled web site things.

>><META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Adobe PageMill 2.0 Mac">

You betcha. Terrible code, frames, disgusting tiled backgrounds (including animated ones) and huge graphics. Slow as all get out. I think the pages were 250K a piece from the graphics. Ran fine locally. Could figure out why it ran so slow on the web. Got an A anyway. It was real fun presenting it to a room full of people waiting for each page to sloooowly load.

[Syren_Song]

My first site was a homepage my husband (then beau) coerced me into making. It was done in Netscape Composer 4 and about 95% of the graphics were nicked from other websites. It also had several animated "Under Construction" gifs (yes, stolen from some other website).

I'm sooooooo sorry!

[tedster]

My first site was an ecommerce site for a friend's health food business. It had animated graphics on every page. I'm so very sorry.

[Craig_F]

my first was made with AOL's free page maker tool in 1995(what was that thing called?). it was one page, purple and all text. I didn't know how to add images, which probably saved me from a real mess.

I tried to submit it to Yahoo about 10 times and couldn't figure out why I couldn't get listed there. At the time, I didn't even care much because I wasn't really sure how a listing there would help anyway :)

I'm sorry...

Now my second site...5 frames, all black, animated graphics galore...

[DrCool]

My first site was a bunch of blueline.gif WPG pages for a real estate office. I think I had around 100 doorway pages up for this sites all with identical content except for some keyword changes.

[Ove]

I made my first site on a datacourse and to get point in that course we has to create a site in notepad, it took my 6 mounth of the course and i made it in frames and i had the text optimized for explorer for 800 * 600 the site is gone now but i have it on my first computer somewere in the house maybe i should find it and put it out again :-)

/Ove

[Edge]

For my first site I used, gasp... Frontpage

[JustTrying]

The first site I put up was a small European-American matchmaking site made using FrontPage, and hosted on Tripod.

There was amazing "marquee" text scrolling across the top of the screen, rollovers galore, a ton of "sliced images," and of course a counter with an artificially inflated starting number. At the time I thought it was quite good : - )

[Gibble]

I don't remember what authoring tools I used, I tried several, but my first page was a geocities blasphemy. I can't remember the exact year, but it was back when they had the avenues and numbers for your accounts and you had to find a free "house" to put your page in.

Man that was awful, bright backgrounds, marquees, horrid colours and WAY too many stolen images.

I'm sorry. I've learned. I've been rehabilitated and I'm glad that site is long long gone.

[bcolflesh]

I worked for an ISP that distributed "Hot Dog Express", so I made some junk on my company space with it, so I knew what customers were talking about when they called...

Then I made a team website with Claris Home Page - it had gigantic graphics, embedded midi, rollover wavs, and about a million validator errors

:)

Regards,
Brent

[werty]

I also used the old Aol web page tool.
My first page was about a mile long and loaded with animated gifs.

[netguy]

Flashback to 1996...

Somebody mentioned archive.org at WebmasterWorld a few weeks ago, and I went in to reminisce. Boy was THAT ever an eye-opener! My 1996 sites were filled with awful gray backgrounds, horrible graphics, but still functional in their crude way.

I certainly wouldn't want to go back to those days, but it's interesting to look back on the history of what many of us were a part of.

[dazz]

i only started about 1 year ago so im still crap!.......yikes i still use frontpage 2000 :)

Lets have another one of these in another 5 years and i can say more.

[buckworks]

My very first web page was made with PageMIll 3.0 and weighed in at about 350K. Probably half of that was font tags! A friend who had his own site posted it for me, but he wouldn't link it into the rest of his pages. Wonder why?

I still use PageMIll, the same version, but I've learned quite a few ways to de-clutter my code.

[tbear]

Hmmmm, frames (only 3), yellow text on black background (some red flashing, too)(I wear glasses to read now) 'Heard it through the Grapevine' playing out of the links page, animations everywhere, ahhhhhh, then the guy fixing my 'puter offered me a job making websites for him.
I believe he's in jail now....

[crosenblum]

I worked first as a Tech Support for an ISP, they were so disorganized that I learned how to do html and javascript, on my own. And created a Tech Support Problem-Solving Intranet.

It is still up, even after 8-9 years. Very amusing.

I kept bothering the web design department people to answer questions from html, javascript, coldfusion, access and so on..

Until I learned enough to become a Web Developer.

I got my first job, a couple months later. Boy I was extremely raw, but I had my own sports site affiliate with a former player, and that growing process helped me learn to develop all kinds of applications.

Content Manamgent, BackOffice Creation and so on.

What an amazing ride.

Now I am a Certified Cold Fusion Developer, working my way to certifications in other areas, especially databases.

Of course, before all this, I was a long time bbs sysop, since 1980, so that experience helped shape me for this internet, in some ways.

This is fascinating conversation.