This website dates back to before 1998, which in internet terms is something like 800 dog years. Those screen grabs above show most of the looks which the home page went through. Don’t laugh — those earlier pages looked kind of cool back then.
Well alright, it is okay to laugh.
It’s kind of interesting to see how we’ve all become much more sophisticated web users now. For example, in the third screen grab I have a little picture of some chain links to represent links. We groan now, but back then that kind of thing was bleeding edge!
Brushed metal
You can sort of see some other trends which web design went through too. For example, for a while there heaps of people were trying to make their home pages look like machines, complete with knobs and dials and fake brushed-metal panels. You see, the brushed metal look was easy to imitate with image editing software. You’d just make a grey box, generate noise over it and then run some motion blur over that. And so there was fake brushed metal everywhere!
1: Grey box. 2: Noise. 3: Motion blur. 4: Make every website look like step 3.
I had a go at some machine home pages too (although I soon lost interest in the brushed metal).
Then everyone discovered Flash and so for a few years I had a Flash site.
There were some other, earlier versions of my website before these, but I can’t find those old files. Which is a shame because from memory they were pretty lame and might have provided a bit of a laugh.
Why the ugly watermarks all over the images?
Yeah, I hate them too and they weren’t always there. In fact I used to also offer the option to click on the images to see them in high resolution. That was fun.
Then one day I was doing a Google image search and discovered my photos were being used on dozens of other websites (almost all of them were blogs), and some of those bloggers were claiming to have been the photographer for those shots. But wait — it gets better. Some of those bloggers using my photos were even threatening to sue anyone else who used them! Now, is it just me, or does that sound a tad hypocritical to you too? So I pulled my whole website down and put it back up again a week later with all those ugly watermarks. Sorry. I did try to at least make them sort of transparent so it wouldn’t be too much of a pain to look at them.
Software
I built my first versions using Claris HomePage (does anyone still remember that software?) and then used Dreamweaver for years after that. Then it was all Flash, and then back to Dreamweaver. In the second half of 2010 I decided to hand-code the whole lot (thanks for your help, Duncan!) and I did that using the fantastic TextWrangler software.
Or at least I hand-coded almost the whole lot. You see, I ended up getting a very smart buddy to write the contact form coding for me (Yep, that was Duncan again).
To the best of my knowledge, almost all of the site now validates to the W3C standards for XHTML 1.0 Strict. It’s much leaner now too — by hand-coding it I’ve reduced the code to about a half of what it was — and by replacing Flash with Javascripts I was able to reduce the amount of code on those pages by about three quarters. Which should help your browser a little bit and also allow it to work on iPads.
Web statistics
Each year, this site is visited by more than 100,000 people.
Let’s put that into perspective.
100,000 is the same number of people as it takes to ride 100,000 bicycles (or 50,000 tandem bicycles). If you lay 100,000 people along the ground you would end up with a line of people as long as 100,000 people. And a lot of people with sore backs. Or to put it another way, it’s more than 99,999 people.
