I made my first websites when I was in high school. I think it was in 1998. They were tied to my AOL account and hosted on AOL. My AOL screen name was “Culligular” which was an accidentally misspelled adjectivization of the Roman Emperor Caligula’s name, whom I’d learned about in Latin class. He was by all accounts a crazy psychopath so I’m not sure why that name appealed to me, but that’s fodder for a different post.
I think the first website I made was called “The Tab Lab.”
The Tab Lab
“The Tab Lab” was a total hack of a website. I played guitar and relied on learning new songs via tablature because I didn’t know how to read music. Via the absolute magic of the Wayback Machine, I was able to find a quasi-functional version of that site. It looks like this:
You can’t see it in the static screenshot above, but the image in the top left is an animated GIF of a hand scratching a record. The other images of the skeleton and the wizard are mashups that I put together using what were probably stolen versions of Macromedia software that I’d found in a Warez chat room somewhere. (Side note: I, “Culligular,” used to pronounce Warez incorrectly as “war-ez” as opposed to “wares” and in my mind envisioned that this name was somehow derived from the villain “Wario” from Nintendo’s Mario games).
Let’s take a closer look:
I didn’t do any of the 3D rendering or illustration myself. I simply overlaid images I found online that matched the theme of a laboratory and a guitar. I guess the skeleton looked like a rocker so I threw him in there for good measure. The font choice for the copy was all mine (though I can’t guarantee that the font itself was acquired legitimately!).
The Tab Lab was essentially a wrapper for the now long-shuttered OLGA.net (The Online Guitar Archive). All my site did was link to different sections of OLGA and a couple of other online resources about playing and learning guitar. I also figured out how to hack the OLGA search engine so that people could search within the main frame of my site while my site’s navigation would stay static in the left frame, keeping people within my grasp. Here’s what my “search engine” looked like, I love the description:
The Tab Lab got a fair amount of traffic and I promoted it in relevant chat rooms, message boards, etc. Most of that evidence has been erased and at this point I have no idea how much traffic it actually got because my little webcounter is lost to the ages, but in my mind it was a big deal 🙂
My Hacky South Park Site
The next site I made was purely an attempt to get a bunch of traffic to a site. I somehow found a list of really popular websites and topics on the web at that time and eventually decided that I would make a copy / paste hack job of a site on the topic of the animated series South Park. I’d never seen the show South Park and knew nothing about it. I just knew that people were interested in it and my hypothesis was: if I make a site about a topic people are interested in, lots of people will view the site. Getting lots of people to view the site was success for me.
I also discovered a novel (at the time) company that had this way of serving banner ads on your site and paying the site’s owner for clicks on that site. I think it was fixed at 5 cents a click. I made $5 off of it and actually got a check in the mail for that amount. I’m sure that most of the clicks were from my buddy Rob and I sitting at his house and clicking on the ad over and over again after school one day.
Why Does it Matter?
I’m glad that I took the initiative to learn about HTML, graphic design, and other web technologies back in the somewhat early days of the Worldwide Web. These sites are funny for me to look at now but I’m proud of my 16 or 17 yr old self for sitting down and learning how to make them. I didn’t do it because I thought that someday these skills would be valuable (they’ve turned out to be) or because someone was telling me to do it. I did it because I was interested in the idea that I could make something that other people would find useful. It was an entrepreneurial impulse that I followed and have happily continued to follow for most of my life since.
