thinking about frontpage
posted 2004.04.21
Cameron Moll wrote a great little post this morning about his very first web site, providing the link in all its embarassing glory, and encouraging others to respond.
Although the earliest versions of my first business (Pathway to Darkness, which went online in 1996) are lost to the ether, I managed to dredge up a version from 1997 in my own archives, and found an even more amusing version via the Wayback Machine from 1998 to share in kind.
This fun discussion spawned many responses and another entire thread on Mezzoblue.
But honestly, most of the responses depressed the heck out of me. Many of the responses in both threads seemed to discuss either a) first sites developed in FrontPage, or even more horrifying, b) first sites developed in the last few years.
Let me take a moment and assure you I'm not making light of these first attempts, or people new to the business. Come one, come all, welcome to the world of web design, but still.
Geez Louise, am I the only dinosaur around here?
My first attempts at HTML were in 1995, which I've shared with you before, and I spent most of that year playing around with it. Hosting was damned expensive in those days, so I didn't set up my own little place online until '96 when my (ex-)husband got free server space on UWO's web servers. Ten whole megabytes of hosting space, to boot. We were in awe. Of course, the URL left something to be desired:
http://gaul.csd.uwo.ca:8080/~mckaig/angie/
But hey. Free was free.
Erg. I digress.
The point is (and yes, there is a point in here somewhere) that I started out with Notepad, folks, and probably worked my way through half-a-dozen text editors until HomeSite 2.0. And I've stayed there ever since - although I now use HS 5.0.
Reading these posts made me feel like an old, old lady indeed in Internet terms.
C'mon, all. Somebody tell me I'm not truly Jurassic. There must be other dinosaurs out there like me!
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My first little page was done in '95... back when GNN was going to be AOL's ISP arm, and they were letting folks beta test for free. I used some kind of HTML-specific text editor, but didn't get that far. I was still primarily on Compuserve, and didn't have much use for the Web.
In 1996, I used AOLpress to put together a primitive little personal/business site. It had a three column, newspaper-style layout, with little 3D header GIFs. It wasn't *awful*... no [blink], ay least. :)
Later in '96, I did a site for a friend's music management company. I had moved to FrontPage by then, but it was partially done by hand... the site used frames, and FP didn't handle them well at that point. It was better than previous attempts... Molly Holzschlag contacted me to tell me how much she liked it. But like everything else, it is now lost to the ages.
The oldest thing of mine that survives in the Wayback Machine is the second or third iteration of my business site, circa 1997. It was pretty much the last thing I did in FrontPage.
http://web.archive.org/web/19981111183850/http://agincourtmedia.com/
I used Coldfusion Studio for years after that (Homesite's big brother), but have since migrated to Dreamweaver MX.
My first year of pages was spent hand-rolling them in Notepad. By mid-1996, I had discovered WebEdit and I cherished the electronic tips from Kenn Nesbitt and Lourdes Jones. I won't share the URLs of the first coded pages, but I have them on 5 1/4" floppies. I tell Web Development students there's no harm in mentioning "Notepad" when an interviewer asks how you code pages. They're taught with a combination of Dreamweaver and HomeSite today in our Irish classrooms.
Thanks all for sharing your histories - makes me feel a lot better! And Bernie, I remember WebEdit too. I seem to recall using it for several months in my hiatus between Notepad and HomeSite. Too funny, the bit about the 5 1/4 floppies. I did have some a few years ago, but finally tossed them (where on earth could you find a place to read them now?). :)
you're not a dinosaur... or alone.
hrmm. my first web page was a little site on geocities... late '96 i think. a little bit of their tool and a bunch of notepad coding. i didn't graduate to my own url and server space until '99. (now i collect domain names and server space like it's going out of style!)
i am a die-hard homesite fan, been using it for as long as i can remember... i won't use anything else (if i can get away with it). i tried to get into dreamweaver, but never managed to actually get into it. though with the new version (mx) i may be able to.
but i've never used frontpage, ever.
and i must admit - it feels really nice to be able to say that.
'96 or thereabout. Still only using vim to edit everything.
My first page was in 94/95, and it was at UWO as well! The Map Library and Cartographic Unit were working on a web site, and I got the opportunity to play around with the code a little. I then made a quick page (on Tripod, I think!) for alumni to keep in touch, but it faded out after a while.
Loved your post Angie... I'm a 'dinosaur' as well I guess - First Web site up in 1995 hosted by Geocities and designed with an HTML feature in WordPerfect (believe it or not?!) -- then 'upgraded' to using the Netscape creation tool... later FP, now DW...
1995-1996 here in Spain. Internet then here was... well, actually it wasn't.
First web ever actually hosted must have been late 1996 early 1997, probably 1996.
My first webpage (and I do mean a single page) was in 98 or 99, I think. I was a CS student in college and I desperately wanted some "real" IT experience so I got a job to build a site for the school's IT department. The only problem was the fact that I didn't know jack about HTML. So I picked up a book and in less than a day whipped up a single page with a little notepad and a little determination. I'm 90% sure that page is living on some disk in a stack of 150 or so 3.5 floppies. Yikes.
But the reason for this comment is that I started with notepad, then went to FrontPage, then went to ImageReady & FrontPage (I repent!), then DreamWeaver & ImageReady and now I'm using only BBedit on my Mac to produce code since I ditched the table-as-layout mindset.
So yeah, almost full circle.
Built my first site using vi, while telnetted into a sun server in 1995. Created my binary tutorial then too (learn binary, hexadecimal and binary finger counting at http://www.lyzrdstomp.com/binary/)
I still use vi for a lot of my web work, but also use Dreamweaver mx quite a bit.
John
Photoshop Tutorials and more
http://www.lyzrdstomp.com/
built my first web-page in '94 or '95 too, using whatever the text-editor was called on the Mac back then. Built things for CyberDog back in the day too... you're not the only dinosaur ;)