What was Your First Web Site?

Written by Zac Johnson
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While landing pages and sales web sites are what drives the most revenue, often times it’s our first web sites we made, that are our favorites. I remember when I first got online (early-mid 90s) and fooled around with designing my own sites. Of the first few sites I made, one was an Orlando Magic fan page, and another was just a funny site I created with pictures and stories that I had come up with. Unfortunately those first sites of mine seem to be forever lost now, unless they happen to still sit on one of my old computers in the basement. 🙁

Like the majority of internet users back then, my first sites were hosted on AOL members pages and free hosting sites like Geocities, Tripod and AngelFire. For anyone that had their old and original web sites hosted on sites like AOL member pages and Geocities, unfortunately they are now (or about to be) deceased and closing out sites. I wasn’t even aware about AOL closing out there member pages til I went to check out one of my old sites a few months ago.

You would think AOL and Yahoo would have been able to find a better way to monetize these hundreds of thousands of web sites they were hosting, instead of just closing them all out. Decisions like these my contribute to why both companies continue to have problems generating profits.

What were your first web sites, and where were they hosted? Did you have a fun or personal web site, or did you start right off with affiliate marketing?

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30 Replies to “What was Your First Web Site?”

  1. Mine was a health related website which i had made to write things about a few diseases which people were to be aware of.. but later this was not just upto sharing information and slowly i started building blogs and affiliate sites and now am just a blogger.

  2. I did my first website on making money online on a free web hosting.

    Signed up with adsense and a few other affiliate networks that accepted free hosted sites.

    I abandon that site when I realise that members of the free hosting site were clicking my adsense ads and I were expected to do the same or risk being "click bomb".

    I purchased my first domain and paid hosting right after that, the rest is history….

    I now work online fulltime 🙂

    <abbr>Roseli A. Bakar’s last blog post..How To Earn Money Online as a Freelance Writer</abbr>

  3. I can relate to this, I had a PR4 seo website on Lycos Tripod just taken down as well. That did have ads on provided by Lycos though, so I guess they just weren't making enough cash.

  4. Mine was back in 1996. Local provider called the Guild. I had a general information site. It's down now as well.

  5. Back in 2001, my very first website was created by Geocities.com. Didn't generate any income but did give me knowledge about internet.

  6. Zac,

    In the 1980's we had bulletin-board systems, text only, dial-up only, on 300-900-1200 BAUD modems!

    You could download some programs, and text files but it would take all night for any large files! Never got into AOL, but Apple Computer had some kind of 'E-World' when I got my MAC-2e online. It did not last…

    Now we have Second Life, Webinars with streaming video and chat windows for questions, and I am re-forming my digital video production company in SF Bay Area California, corporate webinars, tv and web comercials, demos for bands, showcases for actors / actresses, and new product introductions and interviews.

    We have come a long way!

    Respectfully,

    Nicholas Chase
    http://www.twitter.com/nachase

    <abbr>Nicholas Chase’s last blog post..Guy Kawasaki's New Book – 'Reality Check'</abbr>

  7. My first webpage was a community site for golfers that I wrote in Asp 10 years ago (was 15 then). Good times good times.

    <abbr>Andreas Nurbo’s last blog post..New series: Automatic blogging with WordPress</abbr>

  8. I still have my first website. It was a travel site – I love travel – visitor.com

    I also have an infoarea.com site

    It's always fun to think back to the good old days!

    <abbr>Online Forex Brokers’s last blog post..Dashboard FX – Forex Trading Account Software and Training</abbr>

  10. Mine first website went up when my Florida Internet account (now owned by NTT/VERIO) came with free 10MB of "personal web space". There was no such thing as an HTML editor yet so I bought an HTML book at CompUSA and wrote it in Notepad.

    I put up some adult pictures and posted my URL on IRC. Within minutes, I got a phone call from Florida Internet telling me that I was using up 96% of their bandwidth.

  11. I first got involved with web design at the age of 14 when i stumbled into a HTML for dummies book sitting on my fathers desk. I followed the step by step instructions and created a nintendo 64 fan page hosted on geocities! Then I created a jedi knight 2 guild where we posted ips to connect to multiplayer games. I recruited around 200 players. If only affiliate marketing existed back then ….

    <abbr>Issam Saby’s last blog post..Qu’est-ce que l’affiliation ou le marketing de la performance ?</abbr>

  12. I had a personal website at geocities.. later along with my friends we built a team site too.. but these site were not updated after 2001 or so.. later I built a site on Google Pages and now migrating it to Google Sites. But most of my updates and latest activites are on my blog : Technopaper .

    <abbr>Abdel’s last blog post..Windows 7 RC is available for download</abbr>

  13. Hi

    I had a Tripod website that I did for my brother's business. The page load time was unbelievably bad 🙂

    Lycos have just stopped all of their web hosting which has caused me a lot of hassle. Why they felt that it was a good idea to say no to all the money they were receiving is a mystery to me!

    <abbr>Neil’s last blog post..Making a Budget Is Not the Hard Part</abbr>

  14. My first website, like many was on geocities, back then I was only 13, so I was going to create a pokemon site, lol. I started on it… but gave up.

    Till then,

    Jean

  15. First website I worked on was in 2000 was on freewebs hosting after that I got into photo shop brings back memory's gotta look & see how far we have all gone going check if my old logins work lol.

    <abbr>Nick Throlson’s last blog post..AffBuzz</abbr>

  16. My first website was hosted on my student account on my university's unix servers. I did it back around 1995 and coded the html by hand in the pico editor that was available for use. It was an informational website.

    I haven't looked for it in awhile (and have actually forgotten the url), but it was still online around 2003, which was the last time a few years after I graduated with my masters in computer science.

    I never did use geocities or anything like that — every website I've put up since has been one I paid to have hosted. I still like coding by hand but I like wordpress even better.

  18. couple of week back i asked the same question to readers : what was your first website? My first website was actually which i built a decade ago. it was on a free hosting site.

    <abbr>Shanker Bakshi’s last blog post..40 Great WordPress Optimisation Tips by Yoast</abbr>

  19. OOOOHHH man do I remember Tripod and Geocities. EVERYONE used them and I would not know why they even bother to shut down. They could continue making money 😀

    -Mike

  20. This is a nice and very interesting discussion.

    Mine was just a webpage hosted by bravenet.

    It was just a page for my professional profile.

    Then I made my philosophy blog with my own domain.

    Bu it has expired.

    <abbr>Vic – BusinessAccent’s last blog post..How to Get More Customers and Increase Your Sales</abbr>

  21. I had a new screaming baby – the docs all called it "colic" but I knew better. I finally figured out he had reflux and food allergies – and got help from a specialist. That was when I decided to learn html and make a website on food allergies and reflux to help other moms in the same situation. You guessed it – it was on AOL. I had pretty good traffic, as said my webcounter (how embarrassing)… but then one day it said my password was invalid… many MANY overseas help desk calls later, it still wasn't fixed. Then it disappeared. Those were the days!

  22. Ahhh, good old AngelFire. Now that brings back some memories 🙂

    Affiliate Failure’s last blog post..Tweets from 2009-05-10

  23. The first website I published was on Geocities actually 🙂 It was a personal website about myself and it had pictures of Eminem and had midi music playing in the background =) Think I was like 12 years old or something like that.

    Karl’s last blog post..Need to get a credit card

  24. My first website is a blogspot blog with the topic of ptc sites. I just put some banners and I don’t really know how to market it so I never did earned from it.

    Paulubiadas’s last blog post..Miscellaneos Ramblings

  25. In the mid 90’s I was a partner in a high end car audio, cellular and security installation business. Our website was my pet baby, and from there we branched into marketing, and NetAge was eventually born from these endeavours.

  26. I had designed my first website for real estate services, and then created a blog for it. that was a coool new experience for me as a beginer.

  27. I had a couple Geocities sites. I’m am also surprised that free services got rid of the free websites considering that they could monetize them with ads.

  29. LOL, I used Blogger and it was for MMO, I had no clue what I was doing so I used it as a test and learning site, these days when I look at it I just laugh because it was total amateur hour and pretty awful SEO and monetization wise, it makes me realize how much I learned since then.

    <abbr>JR @ Free Webmaster Tools’s last blog post..18 Comment Tools and WordPress Plugins for SEO and Bloggers</abbr>

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