Tue, 29 May 2007

1:09 AM - Websites of the past

This will be my last blog entry.  I have class in the morning.  I just couldn't get to sleep after writing that rough draft. 

I looked at the wayback machine for foolishgames.com tonight.  Its interesting what my old sites looked like so many years ago. 

http://web.archive.org/web/19990508064343/www.foolishgames.com/jewel.htm

Its rather funny that I was making professional sites like usol.com (sadly still looks the same) at the same time as this.  I don't think any of my work is online anymore other than archives or usol.com.  Considering I made my first site in 1996, I've come a long way.  Still I'm not in my prime anymore.  I don't have the patience that I had in my youth.  Like 28 is so old.  (WARNING THAT SITE CRASHES FIREFOX on my pc)  Even though there was a color clash, I just loved that site design.  The splash images are not there, but the index still is.  It was one of my last frames based sites.  I designed that in 1998.. i think february or so.  I was pretty depressed and you can tell by the use of blues.  That was the first time I went really into blue for a site.  It was also one of the first I did with 99% of my own graphics work.  I even made the background in photoshop.  It was just a few pixels. 

I looked at this after reading Laura's blog, a student in my eng 444 class.  She was a bit down on her progress with site design.  I remember spending hours trying to FTP up pages on AOL back in the day.  That was dumbed down a bit and i still struggled.  Using a modern FTP client like cuteftp pro or wsftp would have been a nightmare for me.  As much as it became a chore later, I miss working on my Jewel website.  The legal ramifications of running a site like that are just too much these days.  The RIAA breathing down everyone's necks and now I'm married.  Litigation would also hurt my wife.  I don't think people consider the legal ramifications of running a website.  All of the sites I run or host could be targeted potentially.  The law has been shifting toward business and away from free speech for a long time on the web.  Perhaps it only caught up with the web. 

I liked the customweb.net design I did and I think the worst site was the Whaley Children's center site.  I did one for an auction they held and a coworker later took credit for it.  It wasn't bad for 2 hours notice.  Probably my best professional work ever was kards.com.  usol.com's gaming site that i once did was the most artistic, but kards.com had the most functionality.  I had that asp.net shopping cart tied in with UPS and some of the designs were good.  I particularly liked the last one.  I wish I could code like that these days.  I remember that hack job I did fixing golfrac's site.  Then there was the title companies site and that terrible insurance company.  award-1.com isn't my best design work but the customer loved it.  Its what he wanted. 

I find it amusing that I couldn't design the cs.emich.edu site because of the unions.  I still made it look better than all black text. 

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