What Was the First Website You Designed?

By Jean-Pierre Gassin February 06, 2012

Recently, on Sitepoint’s Facebook Page, Hawk asked if anyone still had access to the first website they built. A lot of people contributed and we’re more than happy to take a look back on how the internet used to be.

If you’ve got your own to add, let us know in the comments! We’d love to see it

Autograf – Marc Hindley

Body Harris Photographs – Denis Vieira

Dynamic Marketing Solutions – webZplus

G Eurafric Group – Obinna Nwabineli

Indian Love Stones – Paul Seyler-Schmidt

Model Systems – Murray Moffatt

Native Pines – Gill Langridge

POPex Design – John Redhead

Rallye Solverde – Miguel Oliveira

Ride the Wings of the Crow – Laneth Sffarnlenn

Thermo Guard Insulation – Phil Perry

Z Bus – Peter Carroll

Why don’t you go back in time and show us your first ever website?

Meet the author

Jean-Pierre Gassin

Jean-Pierre Gassin is a web developer, writer and design enthusiast from the Gold Coast, Australia. He runs The GeekGrounds, a tech and gaming culture site, and is studying a Bachelor of Information Technology.

http://www.epicorganic.net Shelly

Oh, it’s a doozy! http://www.techchron.com/otr/
- Donna
  
  Love it, Shelly! You had it all! Frames, black background, music, and a splash page. Brings back great memories, doesn’t it?
http://travelthenet.com Joe Harkins

When this was site first published, I had been writing a column called “Romancing The Net” for Honeymoon Magazine. When it folded, I started self-syndicating to newspapers as a weekly column called “Travel The Net.”

At first the domain was “travelthe.net.’ Then a combination of being out of the country in a non-Internet country while the registration expired and a sleazy vampire in Florida stole the name.

That original domain name is now in the stable of a re-seller (good luck with that, fella). But TravelTheNet.com is still online as an archive, filed with expired links, in memory of how I began.
http://fcpc-rupert.org Thomas S.

Ahh- the beauty of being a young web designer.
My first (and right now only) web site- built with just 1 semester of HTML under my belt.
brad

I’ve got a real champion from my first year in high school. http://www.villageskisandbikes.com
And it is still live and in use today!
http://cyndicravendesign.com Cyndi Craven

The first website I build, in 1997, is still up and in use…

http://www.nucifora.com/
http://www.st-demetrios.org/ Charles

My very first web-site released was for our church at Elmhust, St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox church, about 10 years ago.

It was a major hit back then and still draws a lot of traffic. Ranked # 1 in google when searching st. demetrios.
http://marcusebarnes.com Marcus Barnes

Another way to look at how the Internet used to be is to use the Wayback Machine by the Internet Archive:

http://web.archive.org/

The Wayback Machine starting taking snapshots of the web starting in 1996.

Enjoy!
http://funktiondesign.ca/funktion_old/funktionhome.html kyle lamont

Here is my first website done in 2002 – last year of college – Ironically won Macromedia Student Innovation Award for my first site, have not won anything since ;) Still like the robot.. the rest .. ughh
kyle
http://www.smminteractive.com Jerry Kidd

Here was my first effort in 1995. At that time design skills weren’t as important as knowing how to code! And it shows! http://web.archive.org/web/19981201224714/http://www.mm4re.com/
http://www.hulsebosch.org Thierry

It’s a habbit, to keep every site I ever made.
This must have been the first.

I’ve just placed it temporarely on my testing machine for this purpose only.

http://www.studentfun.nl/aloys
http://www.donnamcmaster.com/ Donna

Okay, here’s mine … I started it in July, 1995. This archive is from 1996. I grabbed it off the Wayback Machine a few years ago and fixed enough of the links that you can view the home page, South Fork, and a few of the South Fork links (Paddling News, River Conditions, Conservation, River Management Planning). The site is still live, and we’ll be publishing the fifth complete site redesign and overhaul early next month. http://www.coloma.com/archive/site1996/
David Dale

Just tried to find it but alas it has slipped into the ether. It was a uni project in about ’96 called ‘toilet door philosophy’, I had collected all the great humour you find on toilet walls into a website. It even had an ‘awesome’ WAV of a toilet flushing… multimedia!
http://belm.com/twlw/howdoes.html David

Designed for the launch of a book, the site was a direct product of my having read “How to Create Killer Web Sites” by Dave Siegel.
http://www.nathan-kelly.com Nathan

Wow this brings back memories…

http://www.switchboards.com.au/
http://www.tabooessentials.com William F

My first website (1999). All those beads scanned on a flatbed. Hahahaha. Those were the days long ago…

http://www.billfrawley.com/portfolio/websites/BeadsByJoann/
http://www.theresidency.org/hotel/index.html Dennis Bassey

First one I ever built back in 2004
http://www.stanhansen.ca/project/project.htm Stan Hansen

The first page I ever made was about space. During that time I was taking web page building courses given by ZDU. We had a project to build a page using as much of the course material as possible. If I could only remember how to do some of those things now :-)
http://thegeekgrounds.com Jean-Pierre Gassin

It’s so much fun looking back at all of your creations guys, keep them coming!
http://webdesign.mcgrafics.com MacLamas

This was my real first page, when I was making my final work in my graduate course, for studing Web Accessibility, using DIVs and CSS. It’s a test page entirely made only with DIVs and CSS2, based on the Sitepoint books “HTML Utopia – Designing without tables” and “CSS Anthology” (the 1st editions of this books) back in 2005/06. This were my “bibles” in those times!!
http://testestagio.com.sapo.pt/
The left menu entirely made with CSS (no javascript) – a wonderful discovery for me in those days!
http://www.geoffreymultimedia.com Edwin

Oh my. I can’t believe my very first website – a real estate site is still being used today http://www.lansbury.com.au – this was done during the days where you had to use graph paper to calculate the size of each slice.
Robert

Hi,

I designed my 1st website for a friend who owns a butcher’s shop last year. It is at http://www.shieldsmeats.com . Please don’t laugh.

Thanks.
http://cmm.cenart.gob.mx/tgd/antesala/ Héctor Quiroga Pérez

I would like to show you my site “Antesala Teatral”, done with Flash 8.
http://home.earthlink.net/~epmmcnally/rhphm/rhphm.html Edward

This was my first website made in 1996/97.
I recently used a stripped down version for a kickstarted project.
http://www.tsiyontent.com/rhphm/
Surendra

Mine was ( http://www.mindruktrek.com/ ) . Its made using tables.
http://audrone.serveriai.lt Beata

My first website was build in 1998 to learn HTML

I don’t touch it anymore to remember those interesting time
John

I build my first website, genealogy for Viseur family, way back in 2001 using joust. I decommissioned it about 6 months ago (I still have the source code though). The new genealogy site used webtrees (why reinvent the wheel) and can be found at viseur.org.nz
http://www.clairrichardson.co.uk Clair Richardson

This is my one and only attempt at a website, I’m aware now that there are so many better ways to do things but work gets in the way of any improvements so it lives on!
http://www.gcbmrc.com/ Ward

My first Web site was built around 2000. It won’t last much longer, however, as I am working on a new design for the site.
http://lancashirewebdesigns.com Ravi

Yeah, When i was new to web design, i used to learn it ownself and designed a very good website from dotnet IDE.
Carol Lawson

This was my first baby… still a favorite!

http://studio150.com/32.html
http://margueritesdog.tripod.com marguerite sands

this was for an intro site-building class and it tells the story of my dog, who is now almost 12 and still extremely worthy of adoration (though the sweetheart, alas, not so much)
http://citwings.com/webdesigns_old.html Jennifer Kathleen Phillips

I created my first website in 1999. This is a screen capture of what it looked like in November of 2000. There was an animation on the entry page. Images of other early websites I created are also on this page.
http://citwings.com Jennifer Kathleen Phillips

Here it is on the way back machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20050206005836/http://www.angelfire.com/me3/you2phillips/
http://annaleeg.com Anna

My first website was built with GoLive in the mid- to late-1990’s. Unbelievably, it’s still alive. http://www.habiba.org/
Douglas Lemesurier

My first website (then spelled ‘web site’) was back in 1994. A stunning list of anchors, I mean, hyperlinks and a snazzy .gif banner created with Corel Draw. Ah, the memory of all the lovely little font tags, nestled with in a table brings a tear to my eye. It looked fabulous in my Mosaic web browser. I can’t remember if I ever used the BLINK tag. Oh well, good times.
http://reneej.netii.net Renee Jernigan

We had a class assignment in college to do a restaurant website. This is what I came up with back in 2009. I used Dreamweaver CS3 for the site, which I was learning at the same time. I have learned alot since then.
Renee Jernigan

I put the site in the wrong box, anyhow this was my restaurant site http://reneej.netii.net.
http://www.aryan88.com/whiterider/officialjr/ Thomas S.

Not my website- but it has EVERYTHING from the early design years.. Just found it yesterday while working on a school project.
http://www.aryan88.com/whiterider/officialjr/ Thomas S

Not my website- but it has EVERYTHING from the early design years.. Just found it yesterday while working on a school project. Here
http://www.thenerdblurb.com Jeremiah Reagan

Great question! And boy does it bring back memories. The first site I ever designed was a very VERY basic HTML site when it had first come on the scenes back in 97ish? I put together a site that was a “wanna be blog” where I kept putting up information everyday with little tacky “——” (dashes) underneath to separate what would be considered “posts” today. LOL – Wow, how far has the internet come!!!! Just amazing. Great post again Jean-Pierre
http://www.anchorstl.com Michael Meininger

The first site I designed was a media buying agency that I interned at out of college. It was so bad and so dated, I am almost ashamed at work that I was “creating” 5+ years ago.

They have since become a full scale ad agency but and have redesigned the site and brand into a a really nice and clean web layout.

Please have a look
http://www.anchorstl.com

Some people just pick up the trends and great styles instantly and sadly I wasn’t one of them :P
http://funktiondesign.ca/ kyle lamont

link didn’t work – here is my first!

http://funktiondesign.ca/funktion_old/funktionhome.html
http://grantgannon.com Grant Gannon

Compliments of archive.org http://tinypic.com/r/286wxlg/5
http://shadowdev.com Kyle Perkins

I couldn’t find a copy of the original files, but, like always, the Wayback Machine has a copy of my earliest (public) work:

http://web.archive.org/web/20040924140358/http://kaibasoftware.com/

From September 2004
Scott Matics

From 1997-1998, all hand coded. Note very cool Starfield Background…
http://web.archive.org/web/19981212013132/http://cesusa.com/
http://oscaralderete.com Oscar

My first project is based on ajax: http://www.pgc-2008.com, I still can’t believe how I developed it without jQuery or any other JS framework!!!
http://www.marketingweb.com.au Matthew Cummins

My first website is lost in the sands of time – it was a joke site hosted on geocities, and featured midi files!!! of some of my favorite songs as well – all this around 1995 pre mp3s etc – most here probably don’t remember midi files, they were basically music that sounded like an electronic piano!

I remember being super excited when my “hit counter” started to go way up – turns out I had become a “featured site” within the geocities “neighbourhood” – ahh the thrill of it all!

The sad thing is that as funny as all those sites are, I still see a LOT of sites of no better standard still kicking around today, especially with small local businesses!
http://anlenterprises.com Andrew Robinson

I have some screen shots of my earliest pages – starting back in the mid 90’s at college:

http://anlenterprises.com/andrew-help-me/andrews-old-webpages/
http://zettersten.com Erik

My first website ever!

http://www.freewebs.com/enzodesigns/index.htm
http://faithct.co.za/ Galen777

Can’t see any other way of submitting my first site, so I’ll do it here. Briefly… After 18 years as a carpenter, I broke my back and had to lie down for a bit. I got bored and so taught myself HTML/CSS which took me about 2 years (including understanding servers etc.). This is the product of that work [faithct.co.za] (the menu images can now of course be done purely with code, but I was still learning back then). I looked at and rejected all the drag ‘n drop stuff as code-heavy rubbish, so now I code everything by hand using Notepad++ (I like the Solarised theme, which I’ve customised further). I’m really enjoying both being back on my feet and coding. Whoever said that code was poetry wasn’t lying. That was three years ago now, and I’ve not looked back. Thanks for the opportunity. ‘)
http://stepno.com Bob Stepno

I don’t know if “designed” is the right word, but here’s my wordy 1994-1999 homepage, with an amazing “click on the TV and it goes away” effect done in the most horribly brute-force fashion.

http://www.stepno.com/unc/

(OK, so the new version at http://stepno.com is still wordy. But’s it’s CSS.)
http://www.2creative.se Tony

Hilarious! :)
http://www.debbshosting.com Debbs Hosting

I designed a website for our organization before but when I left, it looked like no one had the patience to continue updating it, so they just decided to unsubscribe to the domain host. It was a simple website, which I just filled with lots of photos and colorful things. LOL. It was for a youth organization and I was quite enthusiastic at that time. I enjoyed it though.
http://www.akeelahmad.co.uk Akeel

http://www.akeelahmad.co.uk

i designed my own first, went back to it, to try and make it CSS compliant.

its still a WIP