Overview
If there’s one thing I enjoy more than anything, it’s being nostalgic. Finding old things and restoring them to the best of my ability is quite addictive, maybe it’s just me. I’m a known digital hoarder, and for good reason. Back when I was first using the internet I was massively loyal to some websites such as “DBZ Underground Fightclub II” (A Yahoo Club roleplaying group), PenguinBattle (A really fun PHP based game made by one of my friends), RuneSigs (A very cozy graphics forum) etc. I was obsessed with these sorts of communities and games, but they’d vanish without warning often. The problem with the early internet was that you had extremely limited space and bandwidth, so if your website got very popular the choices were either restart from scratch, pay to upgrade or close the site.
With the chaotic nature of the 90s/2000s web, I wanted to make sure I preserved as much of my favourite sites as possible, and especially my own. During my digging, I found almost all of my old websites and restored them to nearly full functionality. The only things missing are databases, so you won’t find any working forums for example. Some of the items in the Timeline below will have links and some will just be screenshots.
Inspiration
My Dad helped me build my first ever website all the way back in 1999 when I was around 10 years old using FreeServe, a UK company which was acquired by Orange and later EE. They gave all their Customers free webspace, however it was tiny. We had a mere 5mb across our entire domain shared between us, which we later upgraded to a whopping 15mb. Despite the limitations, I had such a satisfying feeling knowing something I made was out there for everyone to see and comment on. Looking back the content wasn’t exactly engaging in my websites but then again, who cares? The fun for me is actually making something I think is cool and if other people enjoy it then I’m probably having the best time ever.
Timeline
1999
Simon’s GoldenEye 007 Site
The very first website I ever created, it was made with a super basic website builder called Claris Home Page version 3.0. My Dad had created a couple of websites beforehand and he sat with me to help me build this. I recall painstakingly editing the banner nearly pixel by pixel with MS Paint after stealing someone else’s and re-arranging the text to say “Simon’s GoldenEye 007 Site” 😜. I was completely obsessed with the movie and N64 game, so it made sense to share this as my first website. I even shown it off as a school project which impressed the teachers.
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Simon’s Dragonball Z Site
As you can tell, I became a bit obsessed with GIFs, especially DBZ ones which were EVERYWHERE on the early internet. Not a lot of this site could be recovered unfortunately, so there’s plenty of things missing from it but to be honest, there wasn’t much to show off as you can tell. I do recall these gifs taking up A LOT of webspace on our 5/15mb web plan so I had to delete a lot of them.
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Simon’s Pokemon Page
This was an even worse preserved website, it was my attempt to “narrate” the Pokémon League and provide results to those who were also watching around the same time. Pokémon was the biggest craze ever at school and everyone was obsessed with the anime, games and cards. I have very fond memories of finding out about unknown gen 2 Pokémon from Japanese and American sites and sharing my discoveries with my friends.
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2002
RuneScape Website / RuneWeb
Unlike the above pages, this was my first attempt at an actual website. Back in the early 2000s most sites used iFrames to display repetitive content like navigation bars. Before that, you had to manually go through every page and update the navigation to include a new page, it was a nightmare. RuneWeb was something I poured a lot of time into and I recall it getting quite a lot of hits back in the day (Good old counters!). If you want a good laugh, check out the Scammers section.
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2004
SJE-Link
This was my first attempt at a personal website, it was really the first version of the website you’re reading right now (20 years ago as I’m typing this in 2024). First, I have to apologize to Xialo for the message on the news section… it’s… embarrassing for sure, but I’d rather keep things preserved as they were at the time and thankfully I’ve matured leaps and bounds since then 😂 This was during my early teenage years and I had a rough time adjusting to high school life. I used this site as a way to blog in a way, but it never really took off mostly because I just wasn’t the nicest person. I started becoming very obsessed with phpBB forums and administering them. I even began offering a service to host forums for people to help them out as I knew a lot of people wanted forums at the time.
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phpBB-Support
Following on from my forum obsession and providing them to people, I began venturing into providing “hacks” for people. It was intended to be a way for my site to be a download repository for phpBB mods but it absolutely didn’t take off at all due to my school work keeping my busy. This was my first ever time venturing into PHP code and actually building a website with “includes” , which was a great way to get around the use of iFrames by include code from another file. I had a lot of fun making this, even the banner was made with Cinema 4D. I really tried to push myself to be better with as much graphical and web software as possible. As I was now using .php files, I opted to use CuteNews as a way to have more dynamic content on my site.
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2005
(JAWA) Clan
I went back to something pretty basic for the (JAWA) clan site, I kind of like how typical 2000s it looks. I did however carry over the login form I used on phpBB-Support which I recall somewhat worked but it was pretty hit and miss. I didn’t really use this site for very long, mostly because our clan got very big very fast, and I moved over to ClanWarriors hosting which used PHPNuke.
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Si Designs V1
This is when I first began using Photoshop web slicing, which allows you to take a design you’ve made in Photoshop and slice it up into images, you’d then delete the image where you’d want the content, and put the image as a background. This changed my entire approach on how my websites looked, I could finally apply my graphical skills to my websites, which I never dreamed could be possible. This was also my first venture at offering my services as a web designer to other people, which actually made me quite a bit of money for 15 year old me!
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MossGames
This was the first website I was asked to make for someone else, it was for Mossland’s School’s gamer club. I don’t recall much about how it all came to be, but it allowed me to really experiment with my photoshop/web skills including hover graphics and special backgrounds.
2006
College Project – Blue Glass
2006 was the beginning of college for me and when I took IT, I already had 7 years of web design skills under my belt so I was really happy to know that one of my modules was to create a functioning website for a made up company and client. Not everyone in the class had HTML experience, most had never written a single tag before so it gave me a huge advantage.
College Project – Si Designs v1.5
This was another module during college, I was pretty arrogant about how good my websites looked compared to the other students like the complete idiot I used to be. I do recall helping anyone out that asked for my help but it definitely didn’t do my any favours at all. I took my skills for granted, and actually got a very poor grade in IT when it was all said and done. I got a big lesson in humility that day.
Si Designs V2
Out of all my early websites, this is probably my absolute favourite. It’s surprisingly super clean but it was a bandwidth hog, the images that make the website are quite large so my site would load quite slowly back then. I was still making websites and graphics for people/businesses so it made sense that I shown off what I could do with my own website. Not much to say about this one other than I absolutely love it.
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2007
Si Designs V3
Even though I loved V2, I just couldn’t help myself make something new. This was during my college days as well, and it was the first time that I utilized Macromedia Flash (Now Adobe Flash) to create the banner. If you’d like to see the banner, you’ll need the Flash Player for Chrome extension as modern browsers no longer support Flash. I love the way this website looks even today, it looks quite professional and thankfully bagged me quite a bit of web design work in the early days!
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MossGames V2
Mossland’s asked me to make a newer version of the website, which I was happy to oblige. This one was a lot easier on the eyes and also utilized a flash banner. I was heavily inspired by my fellow members on RuneSigs who made absolutely stunning websites, so I tried to emulate those people as much as possible.
I Live in a Shed
Oh boy, I had a lot of fun with this one. In college, me and my friend Ryan would be obsessed with flash sites like Weebl’s Stuff and Fat-Pie. We were learning how to use Macromedia Flash in college so it was only a matter of time before the suggestion came up: “Hey, we can do this too right?”. It turns out it was actually very difficult to make animations, especially with ActionScript, so the site didn’t really go very far other than us making a couple of comics. We kept it going for around 5 months and gave up when we realized the task of what we were doing, another more glaring issue was: We weren’t funny unfortunately. 😜
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2008
SiLink Entertainment & Help
I started calling myself SiLink around this time so I could be more easily found online, “Link” was/is pretty commonly used for obvious reasons. This was the time I registered the silink.net domain name as well which I’ve been using ever since. Around this time I started experimenting with videos more often, creating comedy videos for a game called Jedi Academy. These videos actually got quite a lot of views surprisingly, so I thought I should make a central website with all my content on it as a way to replace SJE-Link which had crumbled away over time. I recall getting this working briefly but I wasn’t a huge fan of the design, and I couldn’t ever get it to do what I wanted.
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2013
Yellow
I took around a 4-5 year gap making websites because I started working full time, and it took a lot out of me. This was just a goofy experiment that never really went anywhere, it was some sort of beehive idea I had.
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2014
SiLink.net V1
While working on giving silink.net a purpose, I noticed how easy it was to put all this website work I was doing into a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress, the only problem was that it didn’t always play very well with my Photoshop image slicing approach so I had to go back to working on my actual HTML/CSS skills without relying on heavy JPG files to make my sites look pretty. I began experimenting with HTML 5 Blank, an extremely minimal WordPress theme created with the purpose of creating your own themes from scratch without much PHP coding involved. This changed everything and allowed me to create dynamic websites for my Customers without the need to rely on me to update it for them.
You can view more about this project here.
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2015
Early Days Child Care
Following on from learning how to create WordPress themes, I was commissioned to create a new website for Early Days Child Care Centre. While this isn’t exactly my favourite design ever, but it gave me extremely valuable experience in designing and setting up a fully fledged CMS for my Customers.
You can view more about this project here.
2016
NameThatPokemon!
In 2016 I was very adamant on learning new skills not only to improve my websites but also to keep me busy, it wasn’t the best of years and this project definitely kept me occupied. I wanted to see if it was possible to create a Pokéball entirely in CSS, which after a lot of trial and error I finally did. I then thought that I could potentially make something fun with this like a little game, so I went on to learn a bit about MySQL, JavaScript and more PHP, resulting in a “Name that pokemon” guessing game. The code is AWFUL but I’m really proud of this one!
You can view more about this project here.
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2017
RandomPictionary
This was just an experiment I created to generate random Pictionary prompts using PHP. That’s literally all there is to it 😜
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2018
Tusken
This was a fun little site I threw together very quickly for our little Rust clan called Tusken. There really isn’t much to talk about here, but feel free to check the site out 🙂
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2021
SiLink V2
On the surface it might not look too different to V1 other than the colours/logo change (And you’d be mostly right honestly) but I did a lot of optimization in the background to make the site a lot more speedy and efficient. The colours also represent me a little more, these are my favourite shades of blue and pink.
You can view more about this project here.
