My old websites

This site has gone through a couple domains, several technologies (Wordpress, Jekyll and now Next.js) and some number of design refreshes, but it’s been basically the same blog-style site since 2007. However, I’d been fascinated with building websites for years before that. I recently came across my archive of old websites in my backups so, in the spirit of internet nostalgia and self incrimination, I thought I’d collect up some screenshots of the design atrocities I committed in my youth and share them with you.

Jordan Eldredge (1999-Mar. 2000) #

This site’s footer claims “Copyright 1999” and has “News” posts up through March 1st, 2000. It features:

• A collection of skins I had made for different skinnable applications

• A “tutorial” for how to make “pretty boxes” in HTML (hint: it was just a table)

• A collection of my “favorite links” mostly related to skinning and mp3s

• Links related to my apparent membership in the “Skinners Web Ring” in the sidebar

• A nonsense poll in the side bar which used some third party site to record the results

The site is written as a collection of HTML snippets and templates which were built into the set of full pages by a Perl script which I suspect my brother wrote for me. The “Link To Me” page even features an 88x31 animated gif button I made for the site.

Alpha Crafts (Mar. 2000 - Apr. 2000) #

It looks like shortly after building this site I immediately shifted to a redesign and rebrand to “Alpha Crafts”. When you first arrived at the site you were greeted with this needless landing page (as was inexplicably fashionable at the time):

Perhaps it could have advised you to don a pair of sunglasses before proceeding, because the actual site’s color choice was… something. I recall being particularly excited about the rounded corners which were achieved via small .gif images positioned via <table> cells.

There was a top-level navigation list in the top left, and underneath a sub-nav for options within that section. I’m discovering “information architecture” (or something). In this version I started posting some life updates, like the theater performances I was doing in addition to the stuff I was building.

I had a section of “tips” such as this one on how to use the Glow tool in Paint Shop Pro. This was very much me attempting to emulate the types of sites I spent most of my time visiting.

I had a section of “JavaScripts” (which is an amazing section name in retrospect) in which I made a UI to generate static HTML for my site and a tool that would derive your “Star Wars name” (mine was apparently “Jorel Bapet”). Despite the list of questions I didn’t have the foresight to send the responses back to my server in order to commit identity fraud.

Under “Free Junk” I had these web icons I had created.

The “About” section included a very carefully posed screenshot of my desktop at the time showing how I had skinned or themed everything. I was also clearly flexing my mp3 collection. Nothing says “popular kid in high school” like hacking on some HTML while listening to Phantom of the Opera with a tricked out Winamp skin 😎

Most pages included a random quote at the bottom, for reasons which elude me. I think it was supposed to be from a larger collection, but only included one:

"Either that wall paper goes, or I do" - Oscar Wilde's last words

The best part of this site was an easter egg it included. If you dragged your mouse down the 1px wide line separating the main index from the content, it would spawn a popup containing a URL to a GeoCities site I put up that had this content:

So “random”. The broken image appears to be a CGI Bin hit counter.

htmlhut.com #

Finally, we have htmlhut.com, for which I can’t find any dates. I think I had decided that I wanted to start an HTML tutorial site, again because it was the type of site I spent most of my time visiting. In retrospect there’s probably an inverse relationship between the time you spend visiting HTML tutorial websites and the degree to which you are qualified to start one. But I didn’t let this deter me! Unlike the previous two I don’t think this site ever made it onto the internet, and I don’t think I ever even bought the domain. The design of this one inexplicably (and explicitly!) was inspired by the design of garden.com.

I think I pretty quickly gave up on being an HTML tutorial site, because a more complete version pivoted back to a more general purpose collection of stuff I thought was interesting, but some held onto the name for some reason.

The new content included things like the model of graphing calculator I happened to have:

Instructions for folding a particular type of paper airplane for which I suspect I illustrated all 11 steps in Paint Shop Pro:

And instructions for building needlessly dangerous things like “Match Darts” and a “Blow Gun”:

Conclusion #

Obviously all of these sites are various levels of self important and cringeworthy but I’m actually really glad I both made and saved them. For better or worse they do pretty accurately capture who I was and what I thought was important at the time. I can also see aspects of myself which have not really changed (again, for better or worse) since that time. An unceasing urge to “create” and share the results and a learn-by-doing approach to creating.