My website has been around since May of 2003. That means this May, the website will be 10 years old! I was feeling a little nostalgic about it all, so I decided to visit the Internet Wayback Machine the other night.
My brother registered the domain for me in at the end of May 2003. By July the Wayback Machine had archived my site! Awesome.
The first incarnation of the site had a Regency-era man drawn by me, telling everyone to enter the website. Sadly, he no longer exists, so this is the page you ended up on after clicking on him.
There he is a little bit! The colors a little off because I used to change the colors of my website all the time. This is the page that you landed on after picking a line of the family tree. I’m not 100% positive but I think I actually made pedigrees for each surname.
In 2004, I was obsessed with image mapping. So this design was a combination of an image map and frames. I can’t believe how much I used to use frames! Sorry for the non-HTML inclined, I’m dating my website knowledge definitely though!
None of the pages except the Index of Surnames were archived. Each person had their own page where I listed all their facts, and familial connections. Whew, I remember how much time I used to spend on the website.
In early 2005, I had switched out the pink color for blue. I remember using the same picture and instead of an image map I made individual buttons. Same basic setup, just new color.
By the end of 2005, I had installed The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding. I probably hadn’t installed a theme by the time the website was archived.
In 2006 I used one of the themes and I never looked back from using Darrin Lythgoe’s software!
A different theme for 2007. I really enjoyed this theme and I changed the “Featured Articles” and text on the front page often. It was here where I started to feel like a blog would be fun to have.
In 2008 I made the decision to split up my tree into my mother’s side and my father’s.
I must have changed my theme in 2009, but it didn’t archive well. I was definitely still using TNG. I had also just started using twitter and that black box is where the twitter feed was.
2010 was the year I took the training wheels off and created my own TNG theme. I also started the blog.
2011 – same design.
2012 – still no change.
So that brings us to 2013! I’ve pretty much been working on a new design since 2011, but just haven’t made it work. After seeing how much the site has changed over the years, I’m definitely more motivated to make a new design happen. So hopefully when I get back from vacation, I can sketch out something fresh that will be a new start for the website!
