First Commercial Website

My first ever commercial website was for a local tile-laying company in the 90s. He was a computer repair client and a friend of my wife’s. He wanted a “cool” website. So I used one of his wall tiles as a background and carefully laid it out so it would correctly repeat across the background.

During this time, you would use a frame for the navigation so you didn’t have to repeat it on every single page (well before SSI or Server Side Includes were a thing). So you have the left side of the page as a frame for the navigation and the right side of the page would be the content. You had a thick ugly slider bar between the two pages as Netscape didn’t allow for that to be thin or invisible.

Back then we were using Netscape Composer to design the website framework and then use notepad to clean up the HTML code and make small adjustments.

It was tedious work back then, but it was how business was done. The overall effect looked great back then, but looking at it today, it is hideous, but at least it didn’t have an animated dancing baby on it or flames around the fonts. It did however have a hit counter at the bottom which was all the rage back then. And I’m fairly certain it had a guest book as well.