Site History
Below is a list of all the websites I have developed myself, I will probably get around to uploading some screenshots of the various sites but for now you’ll have to make do with a wall of text.
My first ever website I created at the end of 1999, it was hosted on a free host and still exists today, “NXG” (nxg.8m.com) is a perfect example of the early personal websites, full of junk that no one cares about and hugely personal. Many of my college friends loved the website and visited it often especially to see what I had written about them.
The second website I’m ashamed to admit was a Dragonball Z website, I was enthralled with the series and bought my first domain for the site (futuredbz.net). Personally I still like the sharp edge design, but the site is pretty cluttered. For some reason I never really finished the website and only small sections were put online, the site ran for a few years before I forced to abandon the domain by a money grabbing host.
After this my next project was futurecube.net, this was a Gamecube news and reviews website. It hosted hundreds of gamecube screenshots, news posted by multiple contributors and had some pretty successful forums with a tight knit community. I even went to the ects trade show in London to report news back. The site ran for some time but eventually died out as the Gamecube’s sales waned and I lost interest in the format. Futurecube however introduced me to stat tracking, advertising and forum management. I actually sold the site for a few hundred dollars to someone who wanted to integrate it into his site network, the site however remained under my control.
My next website, smallorange.co.uk was another personal one with a simple “weblog” and a gallery. Yet again this was quite popular with friends and work colleagues. This website was a great learning experience for me as it was the first time I coded a website purely in CSS with separate HTML and CSS. I eventually redesigned the site into a much more visually pleasing and added features like Flash games and a more advanced gallery.
Next on the list is specialistscentral.com, my most successful website to date, the website provided downloads for a Half-Life modification called The Specialists. I was bored of following dead links for downloads and decided to dedicate a site for people to store their files. The site was a huge success with the specialists community and was the number one site for specialists downloads. The site started off pretty crude and without it’s own domain, but with the rising traffic I decided to completely redesign it and give it a new name. The site ran for some years and reached around 1 million pageviews a month and costing me hundreds of gigabytes of bandwidth every month. However the site was destroyed by my host losing my domain somehow and I left specialistscentral in the dust, it was still online for some time via the IP address but I had lost interest in the game and decided to let it drop. The site was the first time I had used google adsense and I was bringing in about $65 a month.
I had registered nupo.org some time before I actually used it, I was playing around with uses for it but it eventually became a specialists hosting site too. It ran like this for a little while until the site was hacked and I left it for a few months, I eventually redesigned the entire site and re-opened it as modifi.net, this version of the site was much more professional and I learned a good bit of PHP. nupo however continued in a different guise, I changed it into a quirky news website and posted humorous news and articles from around the web, it was the first time I had used a dedicated content management system and started to get a lot of good quality backlinks. The site however perished with a hosting problem and yet again I moved on.
I was siteless for a year or so and had not designed a website for around 2 years when in 2008 I decided to come back and it has never been better, my first new website was chaoticsignal.com, this is a personal site on which I post game reviews, talk about my website coding and upload videos. chaoticsignal has been a massive learning experience for me and has expanded on my video editing skills, improved my PHP coding skills and my understanding of the wordpress platform. I also have a host of minor project pages which are hosted over on chaoti.csignal.org, which is a spare domain for chaoticsignal.
After chaoticsignal I entered into the world of sound button websites and have created both randomdoh.com and thesurveysaid.com, these were also a great learning experience as I learned to code limited flash.
Other domains I have used over the years:
fourgen.co.uk: Originally registered for a gaming website has basically played host to a lot of my projects and designs. Still own it and still have yet to find a permanent role for it.
twitchplay.com: Registered to make a shootemup website, never actually used it.
gamepulse.co.uk: Gaming domain, I allowed a friend to use the domain for some time to host a gaming site, the site is now known as bitparade.co.uk, I have no involvement.
