Forum Moderators: open
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?
Someday I'd love to have a beer with all you guys n gals and discuss the good and bad times.
Come to PubConference... [semconf.com] :) If you can't make this one, there will be another next year I'm sure.
Still trying to get on the CSS bandwagon so I suppose I am still a bit of a sinner by using tables. I shall repent! Now I've got my own design business, so I'm sure I'll learn fast!
In fact I was still connecting (from home) with a 2600 or 14.4k modem thru a *nix based free *text* internet access
Right there with you! Netscape Gold was so great when it came out. I purchased my CD (i think online?) and quickly made my first graphical website. Flashing Text, Flashing Bullets, and colored fonts of all sizes! Whoooo!
Dare I say ZTERM ha ha ha ha!
Oh the memories... and I am not even that old! So great reading all the posts in here.
Cheers!
It had the standard grey background, and the paragraphs were seperated by horizontal lines.
Three buttons at the bottom demonstrated my fanatism even then:
"powered with vi", "lynx enhanced", and "best viewed with eyes".
And to round it all off, there was a notice for the predominantly US visitors: "this site is in europe!"
Could have been worse, eh? ;)
I knew there was someone I could blame for getting me into this mess ... :)
And here at the "Home" "they" put a piece of shatter-proof glass between me and my monitor to keep me from drawing on the screen with my crayons.
Things are getting better!
Anyone know where I can get a copy of Adobe PageMill 2.0? It sounds great!
Bird, I like the 'Best viewed with eyes'. Can I use it?
One I forgot in my list of sins a few pages back was finding a zillion fonts somewhere, downloading them and using them on my site thinking that everyone else would be seeing the same thing I did.
The huge titles I made had a different color for each letter in the words in cutsy graphic fonts.
Of course, everyone else saw disgusting 36 Pt. type Times Roman in all the garish colors available.
I'll bet I caused Pepto Bismal's sales to go up.....
Not my invention. [anybrowser.org]
However, the best technical reference in the world can't save you from hideous design. I used a background image that one of my friends had designed for me, cosisting largely of electric blue, but with enough other colors in it that there wasn't any text color that could possibly have given adequate contrast to be readable. I settled on a hideous glowing chartreuse as the closest thing to visible I was going to get. And I proudly showed this monstrosity to my friends...
Obviously, I'm not cut out for graphic design.
(The page has even a pr 2 or 3 today, without backlinks. I believe the googleguy likes the picture of my ex-girlfriend)
I hired a great graphic designer who knew not one lick of HTML - zero! (only slightly less than I knew)
He produced the entire site in Dreamweaver with sliced graphics and auto-generated code, never once seeing an HTML tag. Looked great.
A week after launch the client asked why he wasn't #1 in the SERPS for "mortgage"
There began my education....
the most embarrassing thing is:
I believed what we said.
oh god, please forgive me - I promise I will never be that stupid again.
Now just have the websites built for me, and try not to give to much smart-ass comments on them, haha. And when they are finished I optimize them, and then it's gone.
HOpe this confession will clear my soul to webmasters heaven. At least webmasters world knows about it know..
I built a site that looked *awesome* (still does actually), but, erm, no html text. I mean, literally, none.
It was all built from images created in Photoshop.
It was search result #2,456 (or thereabouts) in the most non-competitive keyword search on the internet at the time.......
Damn, did it look good though.
;-)
TJ
But I did:
* Use hidden links
* Frames (though they were needed) but had big borders so users could resize (I mean lose) them
* JavaScript that was so complicated it created an error in anything other than Internet Explorer 4.0.2.332 (with the second security update installed)
* Graphics that were very small (but the animation went on so long that the user had gone to the next page by the time they loaded!)
* Redirects (but they blocked the back button)
* Doorway page - completely not needed
* Banner exchange adverts
* Recommend a friend script, which could have been used by spammers
* Missing </body> or </html> tags which cause the hourglass to stay on constantly with NS (even with the latest - Netscape 7)
* Broken links and missing graphics
* A checkout process that lasted about 10 pages
* A find facility written entirely in Javascript which did not sort according to relevance, nor did it offer any help or suggestions if no results were found. This meant 800 products and descriptions had to be sent to the customer, before the search even started! (Thankfully I now sell around 4000 products, but the search is in Perl)
* A subscribe to emailing list. Which I still have a list of. I got one address!
* My logo was a 468*60 banner! (in black and white!)
* A page of returned links for directories (which I eventually sorted out - I removed about 55 which had never listed my site, but I was advertising theirs - I have now gone from about 60 down to around 8)
* Search boxes for various search engines, not affiliate searches either. Did not think that customers may use these to find competitors!
* A NoMoreHits banner (please forgive me!)
* A currency conversion tool written in JavaScript - never accurate!
* I also spent about 4 months with an ecommerce site with a full shopping basket with no means for customers to pay other than by cheque!
You must be so proud! :)
Using frames, javascript, drop downs, flaky graphics.
Oh god it plainly just sucked.
But it was good, because it had all the important information at our fingertips. Oh well...
Having a first website, is nothing like having your first bbs.
Similar worlds though.
Now I hand code everything (just basic content pages for our dynamic corporate website) - but I still paste my code into frontpage and use the preview function to make sure I've built everything right.
Hopefully with a little more experience, and a lot of reading here, I'll someday be able to fully design my own sites, without using FrontPage as a crutch! lol
