My First Website
Does anyone remember their first website? I mean, really remember?
I think I remember my first website more than I remember other “firsts” in my life. What better way to encompass the 90s than in a website loading on Netscape 1.0. As a thirteen year old brimming with optimism and geeky passtimes, I always tried to find ways to marry several interests in one. The web, even back then, was a way to do all that.
My first website was a Sailor Moon fan site. Coded together on Microsoft Notepad on a Pentium I computer on Windows 95, using screenshots and images downloaded on a 14.4 baud modem. The search engine of choice was Web Crawler I remember clicking to download a 200KB image and leaving to have lunch. This first website was a dark color schemed one — basically, also showing my bias with light on dark designs early on.
It was also hosted on Geocities back when they only offered 2MB of space. I believe the site was nestled in a community called “Tokyo Ginza” page 5437. I, unfortunately, do not have any screenshots to show you of this beauteous creation. It has been lost to the abyss of the web and old junky computer parts.
What was your first website?
36 blabs to My First Website
Leslie said...
on 09/03/2008 10:39 AM
My first site was called "Warzone's Web" (my Doom handle) that had a spectacular heading made in Microsoft Word. Yes. MS Word ftw! It was hosted on my school's server. I've tried many times to find a copy but apparently its gone. I have other very early work, but that was the very first trip to the dark side.Jeff Smith said...
on 09/03/2008 10:56 AM
I remember my first site being what we'd now call a blog. That was back when I was very interested in philosophy (my high school years) so a lot of my writing was feeble attempts to make sense of complicated social issues. At that point I was very much into reading books like 'Utopia' and Richard Bach's 'Illusion'. It was also a light on dark scheme. I recall a black background, white text, and a lot of deep red colors. Coded of course using Notepad, but I think I was lucky enough to have a 28.8kbps modem at the time. :) I seem to remember it being hosted on Xoom - not even sure if they're still around anymore. I don't know if I'd even want to see a screenshot of it. :)Kyle said...
on 09/03/2008 11:14 AM
Oh I remember well. My very first site was a personal site on Angelfire, which is where I started digging in and learning HTML in their "Advanced Editor". Then I moved to Geocities too -- we were neighbors! I was at /SunsetStrip/Mezzanine. One of my very first websites was for my "band" in Grade 8, and I recently found out it's still up! But you'll have to beg me for the URL. A lot of animated GIFs, a guestbook, and everything wrapped in a center tag! I used notepad until Netscape Composer came out -- that rocked my world, at the time!Karen said...
on 09/03/2008 12:41 PM
My first site was soulsuck.com (in 1999) and had a translation of Dante's Inferno, some personal stuff and was mostly this gothy emo personal page. Notepad and the "Learn HTML in 24 Hours" book were my tools of choice.Jason Beaird said...
on 09/03/2008 12:59 PM
Haha. Fun stories. Our first computer (that could access the internet - the Apple IIc didn't count) was a Packard Bell 486sx from Wal-Mart. It didn't have a modem, but a teacher at my junior high let me borrow a 2400 baud so I could log into IRENE (an educational BBS). It wasn't long before I convinced my family to get a "proper" 28.8 modem so we could access the internet via NetZero. I don't know if it was my first website, but definitely one of the first was a site I made in 1997 that was all about soap shoes and freestyle walking tricks. Geeky I know, but it took a lot of grocery bagging money to buy those shoes and I was excited. I think that site was somewhere in SunsetStrip like Kyle's. I also had a Xoom account, but that account got banned in 1999 because I used it to store an MP3. :( Took all night to copy that file up there, too.Lea said...
on 09/03/2008 02:02 PM
These stories are great and I love how some of us had very similar starts. Haha, Jason, I LOL'd when I read your Xoom site got taken down for the lone mp3 file that took all night to upload. Also, crazy coincidence, my Pentium I was ALSO a Packard Bell! I also had a XOOM site. I think I kept trying to move my free sites place to place to figure out which was the best one.Rich said...
on 09/03/2008 02:08 PM
Mine was a fan page of Street Fighter. :) I used AOL's Hometown, and the page I last left on its server is still shockingly there. Unfortunately, it's not very interesting: just a single HTML page from 2004 redirecting it to my blog at the time. I probably deleted the original files, so it's a shame that I don't have anything left of it.snoe said...
on 09/03/2008 02:21 PM
My first was a magnificent specimen built in Netscape Communicator Gold and hosted on Geocities too. It was full of blinking text and animated web search remnants. Woooooowy! What's funnier is that it somehow led to a really good job.Matthew Pennell said...
on 09/04/2008 01:45 AM
My first site was for a film production company I was setting up - I think I read "Learn HTML In 24 Hours" and took it from there. It had 17 frames (I was blown away by the potential of framesets!), and the graphics were bitmaps created in MS Paint IIRC. And of course it proudly displayed a badge at the top: "This site is best viewed in 800x600 in Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4 or Netscape Navigator version 4".Lea said...
on 09/04/2008 08:22 AM
Matthew -- 17 frames, wow. I didn't know one could actually squeeze that much in for one site! Hahaha... Meanwhile, I also remember being fascinated with Meta-Refresh to create "slideshow-like" stuff online -- with a hidden frame that auto-started music, too, of course. No purpose. No use. Just because I could.Maaike said...
on 09/22/2008 04:26 AM
I built my first website in late 1995 with an editor called Arachnophobia and it was hosted at the /Soho part of Geocities. It was a personal website with some stories, quotes I liked and midi background music. Oh and it had a black background with tiny stars in it *and* there was gif animation of a cat. In other words: this site being lost for ever is A Good Thing :-)Emo said...
on 01/24/2009 01:29 PM
Haha, my first website was a complete failure hosted on 50webs. All my friends laughed at me back then :P.Karen said...
on 01/28/2009 08:25 AM
I remember my first website. Did it for a basic web design class in college and if I recall correctly, it was a personal website / blog / something-or-other... There were frames all over the place and I used PNGs for the images because I didn't know that IE didn't support them and our professor had us working with Firefox on Macs. I remember being all proud of myself and telling my dad to go see what I did. He was looking at it on a PC of course and kept telling me that there was nothing but big blocks of color and red X's all over the place. I of course, had no idea what he was talking about until the next weekend I was home. Now I look back and LAUGH. :)andrew r said...
on 01/29/2009 09:18 AM
My first website was a disaster. The guy who built it didn't understand what I needed. He built what he though I needed. I will never deal with someone like that again.kat said...
on 01/31/2009 06:52 AM
Oh man. This spurred me to check the wayback machine. My first site ( well what was left of it ) is on there. ( http://www.grabup.com/uploads/00037d5fa8bffbbb6ca757728bcdec00.png if you want to see the horror ) I started HTML in 1995. After that ^ up there, I got a subdomain (simplenet.com i think lol ) and my uhm. "design" skills actually were bearable LOL. My first domain was also in 1999.Leo said...
on 02/02/2009 08:46 PM
My first site is built about seven years ago. It's hell ugly in these days: full of colors, positioned with tables, and other terrible "features"... From that on I started to learn HTML and interface design. Nice memories.Academy said...
on 02/11/2009 12:19 PM
My first site was the most unacceptable site ever. Eventually, I learn to let out my creativeness inside me, and, I like it, compared to my first one of course.rachel said...
on 02/14/2009 12:46 AM
when i started my first website i used a free template, with out knowing any html. now i am trying to learn every thing and do every thing by myself. the best way to build a website is to do it your own, with your own mistakesÖrgü said...
on 02/21/2009 04:58 PM
Great work! I really enjoyed this article! Hope to read more from you soon!Alex Velickyi said...
on 02/25/2009 09:28 AM
Oh, I remember it very clearly. It had an image on background, ugly text and three big buttons-links (Home, Map and E-mail). I didn't know about tables. So I used spaces to positionize elements on the page)Daniel said...
on 03/10/2009 05:20 AM
Yeah, I remember my first site was in a sub page of a company I worked for and it displayed some of my work and portfolio :)MichaelWilson said...
on 03/20/2009 08:01 PM
http://www.archive.org/web/web.php If you remember your name, you might be able to find it! I remember my first website was on Geocities - Dragon Ball Z!!!Ableblogger said...
on 03/31/2009 02:11 PM
Yes i do remember my website, I made it a blogspot blog and promoted it within the friends and later on went to chat rooms and got few more people to visit my page but at some point i thought that was not enough, so I started researching on websites and blogs and later on got myself a blog :)Alex Bytchek said...
on 04/28/2009 11:23 PM
I remember my first website it was very ugly.It had green background and had four blue links.I wanted to make something like game portal whear people could find information about games.It is funny to look on it now.Leon (Singapore Photographer) said...
on 05/01/2009 12:32 PM
Haha yes I do remember mine! It is a Ranma 1/2 fan site with downloads for animated cursors, startup/shutdown screens for Win95, etc. It was made 12 years ago! Funny whenever I'm reminded of it. :)Sasha said...
on 05/04/2009 02:12 PM
Oh, I remember it. It was about Star Wars. I've spent many hours in Photoshop cutting Jedis and trying to draw jedi sabers. It also was my first complicated picture in Photoshop. On that site I got an information about 15 pc games with my own comments and screenshots.)James Kurtz III said...
on 05/06/2009 06:16 AM
Salilor Moon fansite! Haha. That's priceless. Mine was a geocities site that promoted my terrible ska-punk band The Fifteens. I remember thinking it was so amazing that I was ON the internet. Like I was all of a sudden famous or something. Ha!Lea said...
on 05/06/2009 04:49 PM
Geocities ruled in its day. It made me feel a little twinge when I heard it was folding. And James, lots of people still feel that way: feel suddenly famous merely for being online, haha.Tigrokon said...
on 06/08/2009 08:31 AM
My teacher said that I have to use frames to set objects positions in my page. So this site consisted of many html pages and it was impossible to change something. Of course there were no CSS. The ugliest and the most important site, my first site)farukh said...
on 12/08/2009 09:22 PM
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on 12/15/2009 02:03 PM
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on 12/15/2009 08:01 PM
My first site looked like garbage and was hacked about a million times. I could have done myself a huge favor by NOT posting it online and just keeping it on my desktop.John Wood said...
on 01/26/2010 12:17 PM
My first site was for my lawn care service as a teenager. I designed my own logo using clip art from Microsoft Publisher and it looked terrible! I was just learning about HTML and remember spending hours trying to find out why all of my text was HUGE! Come to find out, you have to close those H1 tags...Web Design Surrey said...
on 04/30/2010 10:53 AM
It's funny I was clearing up my hosting the other day and saw some of my really old work. Had to drag it into a folder for a rainy day. There is some very funny stuff in there!Jonathan said...
on 06/11/2010 03:04 AM
My first site was called BlueBottle Images - I was doing a lot of volunteer photography and I wanted a way for people to access them. It turned out to be a great project that has allowed me to learn everything I know. I started with JAlbum and as I learned more HTML etc I could make it closer to what I wanted it to be. I'm actually still working on it and learning from it, though it's no longer called BlueBottle Images. I also vaguely remember doing something for Anime Manga Junx, a little business my friends and I started when I was a freshmen (in high school), but all I remember of it was looking at the code generated by Front Page and using Red Green and Blue as the main colors...Mervi said...
on 09/01/2010 06:24 AM
Thanks for sending me down the memory lane. My first site was also on GeoCities, RainForest was the "neighborhood". It was just a personal site, but I was so proud about it. Had to blog about this myself, so thanks about the idea!Leave a comment?