Your First Website
Jason Santa Maria shares his first website and encourages others to do the same (via.) This sounds like a great idea. Let’s laugh about our first attempts — or, if you’re making your first attempt yourself, have a look at how horrible the first designs of great designers were, or how petty and uninteresting great bloggers have been — and consider how far we’ve come.
My first website is long gone. I’m not sure what it looked like, I don’t have any screenshots or code left. I imagine it must have been a horrible mess, and it was probably produced sometime in 2004, which was when I startet getting interested in this stuff. What I can show you is the first incarnation of this site. What’s embarassing about this is that it’s from August 2007, just a little over a year ago. It was long after I learned html and css. I’ve lost any screenshots I might have had, but I found the code, so I applied it to my site today and took a screen. It looked like this.
I have no idea where that horrible mosquito idea came from. It might have been a vague idea that a website should have graphics, a desire to smash into the Tumblr scene with great design and great content, but whatever it was, it failed. But if you remove the damned mosquitos and the ugly logo type, what’s left is certainly not great, but still nothing to be ashamed of.
This is bad enough, but it’s not a total disaster. It’s also pretty recent. It would have been a lot more interesting if I had found some of my newbie attempts. If my first sites made it online, they couldn’t have stayed there long, and they’re certainly gone by now, as are the files that housed them.
What did your first website look like? Do you still have a screenshot or code, or can you recall? Though I don’t have the files, I remember my first attempts well enough: ugly, blocky layouts built in MS Frontpage (urk) or Dreamweaver; the first hand-written html sites I built were imitations of these table-ridden blocky monsters. I hadn’t even heard of css, much less typography. The first public site I had may very well have been a short-lived Lord of the Rings fansite. What’s yours?
