By 'eck, it's worse than Barnsley: my first website (from 1997)
I started my PhD in late 1996, at a time when creating a website was a very rare thing to do. For instance, this was around the same time that the BBC first created a website (and they were ahead of many other organisations).
There was no Squarespace or Wix at this time and websites were nearly all created by writing HTML by hand into a text editor. I was already a little aware of the nature of websites because during my Masters degree (in bioinformatics) someone’s final MSc project was simply to build a single webpage of bioinformatics links. It seems laughable now that this could be a project suitable for a Masters degree, but it really was a new frontier at the time requiring skills that most people just didn’t have.
Version 1
Because my PhD was in a technical field (Computational Biology) and because I shared a computer lab with colleagues who had already tinkered with creating their own webpage, it was a natural step for me to have a go at it.
So in early 1997, I started building my first ever website which I called “By ‘eck, it’s worse than Barnsley”. This was a subtle reference to an obscure film which remains one of the greatest pieces of televisual work ever filmed.
This is the oldest version of my website that I could find on archive.org (captured October 1997):
Click to enlarge
A classic 1990s element of this website is the web counter (showing 7,088 hits on this visit). I’m not quite sure why I wanted to be so apologetic with the subheading (‘I’m really very sorry’), but that was what I went with.
The very first (and short-lived) version of this site — not captured by archive.org — featured a NASA moon image as the background. This loaded perfectly fine for me, when sitting at a computer that was in the same room as our web server, but I subsequently discovered that the page would take minutes to completely load for anyone else not on the same local network.
The website was built by typing HTML into a text file. That was about all you could do in 1997! Over time I learnt about techniques such as iFrames which let me have a fixed left-hand navigation menu and then load the content of each link into an iFrame on the right-hand side. This meant that the URL of the site never changed.
Over time, I found new pages to add to the sidebar including an early Perl-script generated page that highlighted the ‘Top 40’ pages on the web server. This was something you could do quite easily when the web server was running on the same computer that you logged into to do your work. Apache’s web server software would create an ever-growing access_log file which was perfect fodder to be mined with a Perl script.
During the first year or two of my PhD, the server hosted a few webpages from other PhD students and a very rudimentary lab website. In time, I used it to build a website for the band that I was in (‘Bring me sunshine - home of the Sunflowers’) as well as a website for the Department of Genetics (in which our lab was based).
Version 2
I changed the look of the website at some point in 1998 or 1999 and ended up with the following design (although this capture is from February 2007, the site was effectively unchanged for many years):
Click to enlarge
The web counter had been removed by this point, but my site’s name stayed the same. I had also stopped using iFrames so that each page could be accessed on its own URL. The main structure of this page is an HTML table.
The ‘arrow’ (six dots and a > character) below the word ‘Barnsley’ was an animated GIF that I had made (click the archive.org link above to see it in action). I can’t remember what tool I would have used to make an animated GIF at this time…there wouldn’t have been a lot of easy tools to use. I created the UK map image by digitally tracking around an existing map as I recall. Clicking the map would take you to a page I made with information about Barnsley.
The last modified date on the above screengrab indicates that the page had effectively been unchanged for over four years. This was because I had finished my PhD and was on my third post-PhD job by this point. It’s kind of crazy that I still had login access to the server from my PhD.
I made one subsequent change to this site to really flag that this site was no longer active and the last capture of the site by archive.org is on February 2008, so that’s a good 10-year run for my first website!
Thinking back to this site, I have fond memories of the sheer fun of building a website at that time. I like how I had settled on a clean, white background aesthetic, which has sort of become my go-to style for most websites that I’ve created since then.
