Site History
My first Simpsons site was created in the Autumn of 1999. The 100% Simpsons Site (as it was called at the time) had a terrible design - using the Akbar font (urgh!), frames (double urgh!) and was just generally very ugly. The site included pictures, polls, quotes, a list of my favourite episodes, a section called Where The Hell Is Springfield? as well as The Simpsons Dictionary. Unfortunately, I don't have a screenshot for you.
After a couple of months, I realised exactly how poor the website was and duly re-designed, getting rid of the frames and using image maps for the navigation. This new design is pictured on the left. The site included the same stuff as the last site, but now had an added downloads section. The site was hosted on Geocities and attracted a total of about 35,000 unique visitors, not bad at all.
In the Summer of 2000, I changed ISPs and was rewarded with my own web address - www.duff-brewery.co.uk. The 100% Simpsons Page was dead, The Duff Brewery was born. For the 18 months or so that it was open, www.duff-brewery.co.uk was an ugly, ugly website. I don't mind admitting it now. What in the hell was I doing?
Another re-design later and I had begun to use I-Frames to cut-down on the amount of HTML I had to write. The design didn't got down too badly, but I still wasn't happy.
After several re-designs (some of which were so bad that I won't harm your eyes by putting up a screenshot), I decided to make a concerted effort to learn how to code in HTML and how to manipulate pictures in Paint Shop Pro.
On August 30th 2001, I purchased the rob-clarkson.com domain and began to sit down to really learn html. I looked at many websites and eventually decided on a design that I was pretty satisfied with (right). The site was launched on March 1st, 2002 to a pretty good reception. It was widely agreed that the design was my best so far and the Trivia competition proved to be a pretty good success.
However, the design wasn't "Simpsonized" enough, and so I redesigned again. This time making the site very yellow, and including lots of Simpsons pictures. The site really took-off, and The Duff Brewery reached over two million file hits with this design. The Trivia also proved to be very successful with this design.
For the month of October 2002, The Duff Brewery was redesigned as The Halloween Brewery, to a great reception. It was the first time I'd put up Halloween Decorations, and to tell the truth, I was pretty proud of myself.
Until the next time...
