Welcome!

[roxychaney]

Time to fess up: none of us started off as web design Jedi. Not that I ever used a neon tiled background or <blink> tags. I swear. Post your stories of fan sites, personal journals, high school websites here... screenshots or it didn't happen.

I'll start with my high school's website from 2001, complete with frames, tables and inappropriate JavaScript. They've since updated it, but they kept the righteous animated gif logo



Whew, that was liberating. Your turn!

[hayley]

Hi Roxy, I was chatting about this over in the Smashing Ladies post (come join us! Link in the sig):

My first website was called Hayley's Homepage and I built it on Homestead which was a drag and drop page builder. It was dedicated to Terry Pratchett's Discworld series so had lots of clipart featuring castle doors, dwarves, trolls and other fantasy-related stuff.

It actually wasn't as bad as the site I build after that (on Geocities!) which did the whole neon coloured text, scrolling marquees and animated gifs thing. Hideous!

[CreativeArmory]

My first website was made in good old 2000...or at least thats as far as archive.org goes. It was a hilariously bad mix of spinning globes, web rings, over zealous javascript, and my god...the color palette is beautiful to say the least. It was for a fun mud I used to play on my 486. I'll save everyone the pain and not link to it. Good old Angelfire...can't believe it's still up!

[downliner]

I can't provide a screenshot or link to mine It was hosted on the now-defunct Xoom.com (for free of course) and was built using Microsoft Word Need I say more?

[Jbcarey]

http://www.freewebs.com/jbcarey/


that's one of my first real sites.... It was an experiment of 'minimalism'....

[EvoDy]

I have it on my machine still but it's def. odd. I've come a LONG way in 8 years.

[Abev]

I made my first website about a month ago, before that I was strictly off web design.
You can check it out if you like, the link is in my sig.

[JoranQ]

...I built it on Homestead...

It's all coming back now! I'm afraid I'm not able to post a screenshot, although I must admit I'm quite happy that it 'didn't happen' then

I believe I didn't even use tables, just a long website, content <center>-ed en nog markup whatsoever, cherry on the cake? Animated gifs!

[falkencreative]

Wow. Just thought back to my first website... Erm. Embarrassingly enough, my first website was something I put together for my (very cheesy) anime artwork I was into for a while early in high school. The design of the site was pretty well done, but the coding was terrible.

I got into writing HTML with some WYSIWYG shareware software that produced absolutely horrible code. At the time, I didn't know anything about validation, designing for multiple browsers, accessibility... Hosted it on my 10 MB of space I got with my email account from my internet provider. I've come a long way since then, thankfully. The site itself may have been cheesy, but at least it got me started.

[freeman17]

My first website was very basic. The biggest feature was a JS mouse-over to change the link colors. I did the website for a class project back in my old high school HTML class. It was all hand-coded, no WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver. Graphics were done in PaintShop Pro because my high school was too cheap for Photoshop.

[jock]

I made my first website in 1996, using HTML 2.0, when people didn't care if it looked right in IE because Spry Mosaic (remember that?) and Netscape were the browsers of choice. That page is long gone now, I have a copy on floppy somewhere. I changed host in 1997 to my ISP and it got picked up on archive.org in 98... http://web.archive.org/web/199801211421 ... k/guthrie/ this was the updated version when HTML 3.2 came out. It doesn't look right because archive.org didn't archive everything. The pics are bad because I had to use one of those hand scanners you had to drag across the image

[Jbcarey]

I made my first website in 1996, using HTML 2.0, when people didn't care if it looked right in IE because Spry Mosaic (remember that?) and Netscape were the browsers of choice. That page is long gone now, I have a copy on floppy somewhere. I changed host in 1997 to my ISP and it got picked up on archive.org in 98... http://web.archive.org/web/199801211421 ... k/guthrie/ this was the updated version when HTML 3.2 came out. It doesn't look right because archive.org didn't archive everything. The pics are bad because I had to use one of those hand scanners you had to drag across the image

This site is some hard-core nostalgia.... yikes.

[jock]

This site is some hard-core nostalgia.... yikes.

haha it makes me cringe but then i remember what Yahoo! used to look like back then and think hmmm its not so bad! Speaking of nostalgia did anyone have a compuserve number email address?

[vojto]

My first website, I made it when I was like 12 It's still online! http://www.grkat.nfo.sk/Bystra/

[JoranQ]

My first website, I made it when I was like 12 It's still online! http://www.grkat.nfo.sk/Bystra/

If I ever use Comic Sans, my employer has promised to fire me...


...out of a cannon into the sun (courtesy of Futurama)

Speaking of nostalgia, I recently got a request for a retro/old skool visitor counter on the homepage. Fortunately I could convince them to apply these detailed statistics to a backend