This website I made for our elementary school science fair 14 years ago is somehow still online. What did your first website look like?
Cemre Güngör
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Jon Gold
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Sha
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Justin Maxwell
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Sacha Greif
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Julius Tarng
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Vítor Galvão
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Melissa Hajj
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Usama Hajj
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Justin Edmund
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Nick Marsh
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It's been helpful for students to understand that where you start is not where you end up, as long as you keep moving, and that the embarrassment is at least somewhat a sign of progress.
Sha
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@jon My favorites are the “coming soon” pages, that I guess never actually came (made me laugh, as I did the same on my first website).
Vítor Galvão
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Bonus: here's me in 5th grade with an intense background gradient. members.tripod.com
Unfortunately I don't have any floppy disk readers lying around to show you the <body bgcolor="limegreen"> monstrosities I was obsessed with building when I was <10 years old. Probably not missing much though :)
I remember being obsessed with computers & the internet for most of elementary school; I'd be writing simple 'web pages' for years before my parents actually got us an internet connection at home & before I could put them online…
This was one of the books I remember having though - huge blast from the past :)
For years after that I'd faff around with different trends in 'web design' (remember the iFramey stuff everyone on Bolt.com's web design forum did?) before learning about graphic design when I was 17.
Cemre Güngör added Sha.
Much of my web design childhood was spent on places like yaxay.com and phong.com. Yaxay was where I made my first money in a logo competition thread ($25), and I learned a lot from Phong's motion studies (phong.com).
But as far as making whole websites, that started some time in middle school. My friends and I made this website called Jeff's RPG Page: angelfire.com
It went through a lot of revisions. It started as a one-page centered background thing, but went through a frames version with a sidebar, and then the tables version of the site that's still up. We were so excited when we finally got up to something like 40k visitors on our site counter. The site doesn't quite work anymore, but it holds a lot of my firsts.
First 3d-modeled object in Rhino (before it was cool)
angelfire.com
First animated gif (made in Paint)
angelfire.com
First flash animation with Actionscript (clicking enter)
o7.no
First photoshop manipulation
angelfire.com
And it goes on and on. Still intensely embarrassing, but I've actually started showing this in a slide for guest lectures paired with my most recent site design for meshu.io. It's been helpful for students to understand that where you start is not where you end up, as long as you keep moving, and that the embarrassment is at least somewhat a sign of progress.
o7.no
The only thing that seems to remain on the wayback machine from my first website (1995, in college) is the Analogue Synthesizer FAQ
Wish I could find the rest of the site, heavily influenced by jodi and turux.
Then it was my personal site (code404.com) around 1998-1999 I think:
Hmm, I thought Branch rendered images inline...How did you get that to work?
I think cloudly doesn't give you the exact image URL :(
I've kept the first version of my portfolio online:
As you can see, back then, I had a, hmm, "different" style ;)
Here's one of the first client sites I did as a profesional freelancer, a couple years ago:
But I started designing sites way before. Here's a project I launched when I was 16:
Look how "creative" I was back then! For my defense, the average site *did* look pretty horrible back then (in 2001).
[Edit] Found a slightly better version:
I ran a couple of video game websites, and my latest one, Cube Nexus (circa 2003), contained a written history of my websites I made — some that I even forgot:
Unfortunately all the navigation elements were images, so it's just a bunch of broken links now :(
Main page:
web.archive.org
Basically all the sites I had made during this time was a basic 3 column layout, with top nav, left nav, and right nav. Crazy days.
Another site, Cube Fortress Advanced, has some of the images left:
web.archive.org
I remember I felt really good about that one.
I just found another, earlier version of Nintendodabomb, complete with GIFs
Remember cooltext.com?
cl.ly
I thought I was the best at PS. Look at those PS effects in the header.
cl.ly
Sacha Greif added Vítor Galvão.
Sharing crappy first websites, I like the idea. My first one was a more or less personal website made in flash, which was actually built as a way to learn how to work with it. Took me a few moments to even remember the (free) domain it was under, and to my surprise, it's still there (hosted on a free hosting site, too).
You have to click the text for it to open, and then again on the screen that pops, to get to the navigation (you know it's bad when you feel a need to explain it).
hugogalvao.pt.vu
1994. An online art gallery for my high school. Coded by hand in VI back when Mosaic was the browser of choice… on X Windows. Made an ugly banner for the header in X Paint. Thems were the days, I tell you.
Thank god for the internet archive, because without it I wouldn't be able to show you this horror:
web.archive.org
Or this:
web.archive.org
And yeah, I had to walk uphill both ways in the blazing hot snow to school. Now get off my lawn, you young whippersnappers!
Found one! Not my oldest but I can't remember other domain names.
When I was 14 I had an older friend who imported rare Japanese guitars. The savvy businessman that I was, I decided to copy him (and also sell dropshipped Apple products, seemingly). I registered a horrific domain name, came up with a Photoshop masterpiece and then… I don't think I did anything else.
Enjoy! #mouthpuke
@melissa
"We will have more artists here soon, I promise! We have an ad campaign started and everything... really, we will! Really!
Oh, who am I kidding. We'll never get anyone else."
=D
@jon - wayback machine sometimes doesn't work when you share the link. can you screenshot or find a direct link?
Wayback machine is spotty, but is also non-profit. Donate here:
archive.org
@Jon — awesome, man. Dribbbling before dribbble existed with that rendering
@justin - c.jon.gd
@jon I LOVE THIS
None of these websites have nearly enough under construction GIFs.
Melissa Hajj added Usama Hajj.
@jon My favorites are the “coming soon” pages, that I guess never actually came (made me laugh, as I did the same on my first website).
On an unrelated note, the first icon of your Chrome extensions (the key), is that a password manager, and if yes, which? (I'm always looking for new and better ones)
@vitor - 1Password. And I still do coming soon pages that never actually come soon today - old habits die hard I guess :P
@melissa - I remember having loads of demos of WYSIWYG HTML programs in the 90s; treasure troves of under construction signs.
@branch - please implement @replies :(
@jon I thought so, but for some reason my recollection of it was a bit different.
@jon and @melissa Bam. textfiles.com
@vitor you're my hero. and now i have burn-in on my eyeballs.
My first was the fall of 1993, written for a chemistry project in VI and hosted on my school's DECstation (?). Sadly, this has been lost to the mists of time.
But while we are all embarrassing ourselves, I too did an online gallery for my high school:
As you can see, I had an adolescent love of Photoshop's filter menu. And Bryce 3D. And Kai's Power Goo. Does anyone else have a particular filter plug-in set that they remember loving?
@usama - we had the same haircut in highschool
Most of my websites aren't online anymore, although I bet I could find the source to some of them and revive them if I really wanted.
web.archive.org <-- Probably one of my earliest. There's literally no images that were saved...and it was an image based site.
web.archive.org <-- An earlier version of my portfolio, but not the earliest by any means. This is only two years ago, which is nuts.
Cemre Güngör added Nick Marsh.
Some great reminition gong on here. That should be a word. Here's my earliest work. Still stands up to be honest! choosenick.com
@nick sma5h tv! awesome! i love the bloomberg mountain thing too.
Nick — damn good for some early work :)
