Jun 16 2008
Early Memories of the World Wide Web
While I was cruising the Wayback Machine for semi-dodgy content, I also checked out my first attempt at Travoholic.com from November 2000. I got all nostalgic and started to think about my early memories of the Web which mostly involved frustrating attempts at finding information about backpacking around the world. The pickings were slim in those days.
The lack of information, especially on hostels, is what inspired me to get started on my own site. But Travoholic wasn’t my first ever attempt at an online presence. My first site was called ‘All Things Canuck’ and it was hosted for free somewhere but do I have a clue where? Sadly, no. I really wish I knew the URL so I could find it because you will never see a page with more pink and red flashing, spinning, seizure-inducing maple leaves in your life. It was a site about, well, all things Canadian and I think I went a bit overboard with the patriotism. Keeping with the theme of most sites from the 90’s, it was hideous. But it was mine and I liked it. Sort of.
Ah but those were the good ol’ days. When everyone’s websites sucked and content truly was the only thing that set you apart. Invisible tables had only been discovered by a select few and most sites were riddled with giant H1 tags, animated clipart, default blue links, and a web ring membership at the bottom of the page.
Driven to act by a lack of useful information on backpacking (mainly hostel reviews) and the scary design of 99% of the sites on the Web, I was inspired to have a more serious go at building my own site and All Things Canuck was laid to rest (thankfully) and Travoholic was born. Now I too had a site completely lacking in any good information with a lame design, but it was my own so it made it ok.
I was inspired to build my site by other sites that I didn’t think were doing a good job. The main one was Hostels.com which had a huge directory of hostels and contact details, but no information about whether the hostels were any good. Another was BUG Europe which had some great backpacking information, but let people down in the area of hostel reviews as well. Not long after I started my site, they set up a great review system and have one of the largest colelctions of reviews out there. That should have been me! Oh well… stupid university.
Back in those days I had never dreamed that I’d be able to make money from my site. The only thing that seemed to be offering money was Commission Junction (I think that’s who was running it) with their banners that paid $0.00000001 per view. Or something like that. Considering my pages weren’t getting any love, I think I earned about $0.00003 and then decided to take them off and gave up the idea that money could be made.
So I was wondering how many of you guys got into building websites fairly early? Do you remember what sites inspired you to build your own? Did you predict that it would be a money maker or were you just in it to learn a new skill and share some information? Is your first ever site long gone, or still around?
Go on… hit up the Wayback Machine and show us some of your early attempts!
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I've been travelling since January 2008 living off earnings from the web. Follow me as I bum around Asia and beyond, getting up to mischief and working online as I go.
Ahhhh early web design! I think my first website was about that time - 1999 or 2000, I don’t remember quite which. I spent hours doing coding of HTML from scratch. Pain in the A$$$!!!! Rather ugly as well. I did manage to monitize it through Amazon partnerships but never got it to make any $.
Though, to be frank, those wern’t my ‘early web’ days. I still remember in 94/95 sitting for hours on the internet chatting with friends on AOL IM and surfing the web, which had just gone visual. Before that I remember reading my dad’s Compuserve listserves as early as the 80s.
Now, of course, I work online full-time as does much of my generation and there’s hardly anyone who blinks an eye at it. Although many people are mistified as to how I can make a full-time living doing it.
The website that inspired my first plans for a website had THE KILLER (as in good) DOMAIN NAME: word.com.
Today it is owned by a dictionary but back then (´95-´99) it was a this ultra cool online publications with tons of interesting stuff to read and lots of it about sex and/or drugs. There are some fragments surviving on archive.org but not enough to give the total impression.
http://web.archive.org/web/19980121232903/http://word.com/index.html
Though it had great content it committed a then to be mortal sin in web design, lots of frames as can be seen by the archive.org salvage.
I had been away from websites for years…A lot has changed since 1998 I think is the last time I did anything much. I had a couple…I was much younger so warez was really appealing to me and drew lots of traffic for the pay per impression advertisers. Back in those days there were TCL scripts that you could run on an eggdrop bot in an IRC channel that was dedicated to loading each other’s banners and generating “clicks”…good times!
Oh…I set up a site that ran on a server in my garage. It was specific to the decoding of satellite television signals - or the hardware/software to accomplish that and so my visitors came with cash. Made a lot of money off of that one though it was very short lived. I did that site with phpnuke which was THE cms of the day. When I decided to give websites another go, I went for phpnuke - bleh what happened? It used to seem so slick, now it’s cumbersome and the support is practically gone unless you’re building a site specific to gaming so I’ve had to learn a few new things err…still learning actually. WP wasn’t too tough, but I’m putting a couple of sites together with Joomla and to get the most out of that WOW it’s a lot to learn but I think in the end worth it.
Your description of first web sites reminds me of that episode of the simpsons when Homer builds a web site….it was funny. I went looking for some of my old sites the other day, just to see what kind of page rank they might have…didn’t find any.
I used to like to pretend I could build websites…I remember having a geocities site in highschool. I don’t remember what it was about though. Something silly.
ooo and commission junction pays per view not click????????
I have adense but that is pay per click….I’d love to get adware that is pay per click…..
Actually I need to look into this whole ad thing……. any advice?
Adsense has a pay per view model, too; but that’s only if an advertiser chooses to run a campaign specifically on your website. Good if there is competition for banner space; really bad if there’s only one advertiser who is paying the minimum possible. This is currently happening on one of my websites and the results are poor. You can ban specific advertisers but I feel this time I will just hang on and see if there will be competition in the long run. Main source of income is affiliate programs anyway.