Website evolution

My first Homepage (1996) was built by using, sorry to mention it, the Frontpage editor. The design was typical for a first homepage. Loads of various colours and blinking animations.

The next episode started in February 2001, during my civilian service time – I built it from scratch by using handwritten HTML. I did everything for a perfect view in all available browsers – which was a nightmare. Most browsers didn’t support HTML4 and CSS standards, so mostly I had to use older constructs.

After the site reached 80MB and about 3000 files, I was lost. Well not lost, but it consumed to much time to update the site. I was looking for a system which can do the HTML job for me: A Content Management System (CMS) should do …

So I switched (11.2002) to one of the most powerful CMS systems on the open source market: Typo3. It is a very well known product nowadays and is commonly used for big and professional web sites. Typo 3 is extremely powerful, but you also have to put a bit of energy into it to get out what you want (initially to learn the system). It is a flexible system and built for professional needs, including work-flow, user management, caching system, and a lot more … In my Typo3 section you’ll find my template which you can use for free and adapt to your needs … Have fun learning Typo 3, it is worth the work for big sites. For private use I am not sure to recommend it or not. Check it out yourself, for me it was too time consuming whenever I needed feature changes.

Another change was in summer 2005. Typo 3 was kind of too big for me. There was no way to edit some source code without learning the system. I was looking for a neat small system, which I can handle easily without spending hours to integrate new features. A friend of mine told me about Wordpress, and I looked at it. It turned out that it was exactly what I was looking for: small, flexible and smart. I can even understand the code of some files without learning the whole complex infrastructure, as it it a really small but powerful software! Initially it was “only” a blogging software, but nowadays you can also generate static web sites and use it as a normal small CMS. Also hundreds of plugins make live easy, e.g. to plugin my image gallery. Perfect. So now you are up 2 date with my website history ;-)