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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?
I set up a BBS when I was 13 called... Er... Sweet Leaf... It was all about the sweetness of leaves... Yes... Quite.
Rock on! I had a BBS on my parents' phone line working from midnight to 6 am :)
Man, were they pissed some times :)
Hi, my name is Rae, and I built my first site in late 1997 with Homestead.
Used their pagebuilder you had to download every time. It had a red textured background, basic homestead globe graphic with a yellow line circling it and yellow and white text. One subpage, just as hideous. Man, I showed that site to everyone. I was so proud. My second and third sites were also on Homestead... I had no ambitions of a commercial site. I was just doing them to do them.
Upgraded to Netscape composer in 1999 and built my only site fit for human eyes (although barely) with a purpose - still not commercial. Still didn't know a lick of HTML and it was hosted on Netscape free space. I remember being so frustrated at not being able to make the table columns different widths (hanging my head in shame). I had NO clue what a search engine ranking was, not idea about titles, metas, etc. Just a personal website-a-holic who didn't know HTML, SEO or had even submitted a single site to a search engine.
In 2002 I found affiliate marketing by accident. I learned REAL code and learned SEO and am now making double what my husband does.
Luckily, Homestead upgraded to paid hosting a few years back and all my old sites were trashed and there is no evidence to be found, LOL. The site I made in 1999 is now run by another person and has since been redesigned. But I still think back to that first red site and shudder. My apologies for ever creating a website without a license :).
Rae
[edited by: Macguru at 1:39 am (utc) on April 3, 2003]
[edit reason] No specifics please, thanks [/edit]
I am woefully ashamed of my second, consists of nothing but links and created on FrontPage, at least I learned how to submit it to Yahoo and Alta Vista and 400,000 people have visited my humiliating site.
If somebody could tell my what PHP is perhaps it could be improved.
The site wasn't great by any strectch of the imagination but, my second site got me a sweet job as a webmaster for an ISP my senior year in high school.
My first website is still on Geocities; and for posterity's sake I update only enough to keep the contact information current and to keep Geo/Yahoo from closing it down. It's pretty horrific, but it still gets traffic.
Actually, I "may" have had one on AOL even before that, but I try to put those memories behind me ...
I've actually gotten lazier in the past few years, although I think of it as being more practical, since I'd rather spend my time adding content with a WYSIWYG editor than playing around with HTML in a text editor. I can put a site together in notebook, but I can't maintain as many of them as I currently have.
Best of all, still running and getting loads of visitors every week. Hehehe!
Then, feel free to change text color to yellow. ;)
Feel free to start another tread about it, my son.
Forgive me.
Graphics? What Graphics? ;)
I do remember on my first pages saying things like
"how do the images get in there"
and
"what's ftp?"
I also remember taking some on cd html course type thing. I think there was blinking text and horrid garish colours, hehe.
I also remember asking "what are those meta tag things?". I was working on an annual report for a big corp. My boss said "Just copy the ones from last year".
Anyway, it was a godsend when NN4.x came out because it was so fast stable....
I don't remember for sure what my first web page was, but I can guarantee it was scary. I know that it was done on a text editor because there weren't many graphical editors out yet. I also remember that all of the pictures were black and white because I didn't know anybody that could afford one of the color scanners back then. In fact I was still connecting (from home) with a 2600 or 14.4k modem thru a *nix based free *text* internet access through the local library. This was right at the end of the BBS days.
Now...I'm still using a text editor for the web design. Just a little faster computer.
:BODY:
:P:HELLO WORLD:/P:
:/BODY:
C was one of my first languages learned, so I thought this was appropriate to get me going.
First site? Oh yes, the company I was doing some Access deduplication for on a 486 with on 14Meg of spare disk space, wanted a site... Well I did them a site and they went bust :0 Come to think of it nothing changes :
Rich
Today it's 2/3 in most s.e's and convinced the client to have a redesign. Phew ... I can now link to it from my corporate site.
Are there people that created work they're not proud of and won't link to it from their own site?
It's evolved just a little since then, but incrementally rather than drastically.
Tested too many "failed" garbage strategies... but learned alot from those failures! :)
Doorway pages did work for quite awhile -- a 5 page site and 100 doorways?
[edited by: fathom at 8:12 am (utc) on April 3, 2003]
First web site was around 1997. It had three big frames on the home page, if you clicked a button it would link to a page with more frames breaking up the page further! (you know the scrollable frames with BIG borders breaking up the page).
Urhhhh...
Okay, now how 'bout hearing how y'all went pro and eventually hit-it-big?
Never did master "hit-it-big" :(
It was fun but it only worked on later versions of IE. The javascrpit was dangerosuly slow and the gif was 100K hence it only looked good locally.
"Why does it load so slowly? why doesn't it work like I want it to?Testing whats testing?
Oh well :)
<added>
Telephone converstaion with friend having "launched" above web page went something like this.
Me: "Hi mate, will you take a look at my **new** website, i've just put it on the web. It's my first attempt so be gentle"
Him: [reluctantly] "Go on then what's the url"
Me: "url is..."
Him: "types in url a and clicks enter"
Me: anticipation growing (how sad am I?)
Him: "all I see is a blank page with errors"
Him: "what am I supposed to be looking at?"
Me: "well it supposed to be a .......(see above)"
Him: did you test it other browsers like netscape?
Me: "whats netscape?"
Him: "Ha HA HA HA" 'Click' .....tone
Sorry, Sorry, sorry.
</added>
So what's the sentence, do we have to recite some prayers now?
I was in the local 612 bbs scene, in the start of the bbs scene in 1980. At different parts of time between 1980,1984, 1992 I had 3 different bbses.
In fact my last bbs is still listed in the textfiles.com bbs list for 612.
Ever since seeing my first Apple 2+ computer, I knew computers and I would be good friends.
I have always been a pure coder, using textpad to do all my coding. I absolutely can not stand wyswyg, especially if i have to clean up the code created by other people using them. It's always ugly.
Man time does change.
My first site was a techsupport intranet/troubleshooter.
My second site was for my bbs modding group, Thought Surfers.
My third site was a sports site, started with static html on geocities and worked my way up from geocities to Cold Fusion 5 and SQL Server.
What a long road, I learned that I am an obsessive compulsive, when it comes to features and tweaking, I always want to add something new or try something new.
From designing a content management system to story management, forum management.
I loved seeing all the great ideas for managing data, and try to come up with coldfusion versions of them.
For anyone who wants to remember the bbsing days go to textfiles.com, they have a bbs documentary going on, as well as stuff from the old days.
Someday I'd love to have a beer with all you guys n gals and discuss the good and bad times.
I recently revived it and have changed a lot on it during the last 6 months. After introducing CSS, I went trhough all 40+ pages and removed about half of their weight in excess code. Frankly, It is finally starting to look like something I like.
My first was for a college class in '95, pages were composed of 4 frames (header, left nav, content, footer). Ouch.
Yellow, red and gray text on a black background, a big animated gif with an envelope and the word "email" circling the envelope. To separate sections in the content frame, I using the 'ol "line of fire" animated gif. Had an animated gif on the bottom that said best viewed with Netscape, with the rotating "N".
Still, my parents back home were so excited to a see a blurry, distorted picture of me on my "about me" page. Like I was famous or something because there was a picture of me on the web.
A friend of mine who worked at Prodigy kept telling me I needed to put my business on the web. Gave me a free account, and I built a page with the prodigy page builder software. Had my first sale withing a week... just from a apge that said, "Here we are world!" and had my phone number. This was 1994.
Stayed at prodigy for about 6 months, consistently getting 2-3 sales a month. Moved over to my own domain at a local ISP and have never looked back!
Confessions: over the years, I have played with a LOT of things. I have used (some not for very long!)
1) Frames
2) Flashing Text (All of a day!)
3) Pop-Ups (again, a couple days only)
4) Doorway pages
5) Invisible Text
and many other sins.
Never used flash.
I am STILL using a shopping cart I wrote in 1998!
I still use Formmail (very modified) from Matt's Script Archive!
I still enjoy it!
dave
PS: Though I have tried various WYSIWYG editors and all, I still go back to hand-writting code with WebEdit ver 2... I am just at home with that, and I think I have more control!
