No matter what you call it, whether it be Halloween, All Hallows Eve, or even El Dia De Los Muertos, it's here again. This year I decided against redecorating the site with some spooky icons; but there will still be a new theme for the Chistmas holiday season as always.
Despite this, I thought I'd get in the mood for some frightening stuff and show you the horrors of this site's previous incarnations (the previous one has been ignored as it was quite similar to this one, but had more graphics such as the stonehenge picture in the footer).
Version 5: This version was the last time I used a fixed width site - it being permanently 800 pixels wide. The biggest pitfall of this version was that it looked ridiculous on high resolutions, and the drop down menu's caused some problems for some users. Overall the site was just too blue as well.
Version 4.1: It's been so long now since I used this version (Early 2005) that I'd almost forgotten about it - but the "WayBack Machine" forgets nothing. Unfortunately from this point on the sites stored in the archive are missing more and more of the images so it's harder to get the full feel of how bad they truly were. Already though you should see how bad this one was. I have no comments about this site, it was so bad it defies comment.
Version 4.0: Going back to this version from the one above there was very little change - mostly just in the way the colours were and some changes to the menu. This design just felt totally wrong and didn't really look like a site; more like something quickly put together with no thought whatsoever. This one also happens to be the first incarnation to be PHP; and used a very rudimentary version of entity (at the time known as neoCMS). The biggest problem when this one started was my previous sites were all orientated towards games and those sort of sites tend to take on a different style. It's taken some time to move away from that as you can see - and the current design although it's moved a long way from the early designs it still isn't very good. Maybe one day in the future I'll come up with a design I like!
Version 3.7: The biggest sin of this site is it's splash page. It's not just the fact it's got a splash page that's wrong either - it's a splash page that has a pointless Flash animation with no actual purpose. One of the worst design sins that can be made! Oh, the horror! At this time you will notice it was also using a different domain. This was because at the time my web connection came with a free domain and webspace; however the major downside was no support for PHP so in the end it had to go. Once you leave the splash page (yes, the other version revisions also has a splash page) you'll find yourself on a very dark site with greys and blues - a common theme throughout the life of New Earth Online (or New Earth Productions as it was known at the time). Again the site was too cluttered, was really hard to maintain due to it being static HTML (though just before I got rid of it I did write a program for uploading changes) and was a table based layout with no attempt at being standards compliant. To be honest at the time I had not heard of these standards, I did not know proper CSS - all my styling was done inline mostly as attributes of the element.
Version 3.5: This one was very similar to Version 3.7 but was done using percentages instead to make it scalable - not sure why I switched to fixed width to be honest.
Version 3.0: The first in this series of changes was a little brighter, was still in tables, and had a few structural changes. The use of three columns was absolutely pointless which is a good example of why not to add extra columns to a site. If you're going to add an extra column it should have a reason for being there. Another thing that I did at that point was to also have various things highlighted at the top of the site such as available downloads and news.
Version 2.5: Absolutely abysmal design. I can't really emphasise how bad this design was - only looking at it in disgust will you understand. It's bad, really bad - and is a good example of why these past versions constitute a "What Not To Do" of web design.
Version 2.0: This one is the oldest iteration of my site still in existence, and is again on a different server - this time it was on a Freeserve domain (later called Wanadoo, prior to be taken over by Orange). Very little survives of this design, but it was far simpler than any of the later revisions. The major horrors of this site can be found by looking at the source code - totally goes against all standards, and is using a table for layout. It is also evident it was built in Dreamweaver (think it was version 3) so even the JavaScript on the page is really bad and obtrusive. The design itself was overly cluttered but the purpose of the site was to be a source of information for the Star Gate SG-1 modification I made for Duke Nukem 3D (actually got quite a following back in the day). You'll also notice that I was "blogging" at least as long ago as 2000.
That brings me to the end of what is still available; anything older was really really bad, far worse than what you see there with an abundance of animated GIFs and backgrounds that were desktop sized - really bad stuff.
