I’ve made three and a half websites so far this year. And last year I built the Bixbite website (the one you’re seeing now!) to launch my freelance brand. I learned the skills though hobby projects, so its something I really enjoy doing. I never wanted to have a career in web development, but it’s certainly nice that I get to flex those muscles in my professional life from time to time!
But this story begins waaaaaaaay back in 2005, before I had even started high school. I used to frequently surf Pokemon fan-sites showcasing character art, game hints, and media resources. It was these sites that inspired me to try my hand at creating my own.
There weren’t many options when it came to browser based web builders in the mid 2000s. The main ones were GeoCities and Angelfire, but I ended up using the Tripod web builder from Lycos. I found the WYSIWYG editor to be loads of fun, and spent countless hours messing around with it while listening to the same twelve Gorillaz and Pink Floyd songs over and over. I would work on it any spare moment I got, even using the library PCs in my lunch breaks at school.
My fan site was nearing completion, but I decided that the ads that plagued free web hosting services of that time were too invasive. That’s when I started getting a little more serious about my hobby, and I started building my first layout from scratch in Adobe Dreamweaver.
By this stage I’d been working on the site on and off for several years, and I had done many overhauls on it as my knowledge of all things web development grew. It wasn’t until 2010 that Sora was published to the web. It was a simple site with a table layout and a few articles and pages of my artwork. Basic as it was, I was incredibly proud of it.
I continued to work hard on it, adding more content every month for a few years, even giving the layout a complete overhaul when I learned how to use div elements and CSS. Sora’s third and final iteration came about when I discovered WordPress, and I made my first ever responsive layout with media queries. Sadly, this version of the site never went live. I’d only needed to make few more images for an article, and then everything would have been ready to publish.
But I never managed to get it done… I had another project on my mind. At this point in my life, my partner and I had opened our hobby game shop, BattleAxe, as a bricks and mortar store, and our existing web shop needed some extra attention.
A static “new site coming soon” page remained up on Sora’s domain until my hosting plan expired; but since by that point it was clear to me I wouldn’t be working on it again any time soon, the expiration warning emails were deleted, unread. For the next five years, I thought I was finished with Sora.
While I did keep the website files and layout images, I didn’t take any measures to document the site while it was live. Archiving my old projects has been a recent undertaking of mine, so I decided to use the Wayback Machine to get some snapshots of Sora for my portfolio.
However, since the final layout never went live, this method wouldn’t work when it came to documenting Sora’s last iteration. In order to take some screenshots, I’d have to upload all the old files to my current host, and reconfigure everything to the new servers and databases. Even after that, it would be a lot of work to get the layout in working order, since it was designed for a much older version of WordPress.
But I still did it. The obsessive need I have to meticulously document things like this cannot be understated.
In going through this process, I realised that there was quite a story behind Sora’s creation and evolution. I figured that in writing about my first website project, I could follow up with my more recent professional endeavours in this area, so I decided to make this blog post.
You can find snapshots of Sora.net.au on the Wayback Machine, and can read the content written by a young teen Pokemon fangirl in all its cringey glory!
It’s somewhat of a theme that many of the projects I take on through Bixbite link back to interests from my youth. Sora is a perfect example of this: what started as a hobby site to show of my Pokemon fan art led to many professional opportunities as I got older.
I’ll soon be making some follow up posts about the next chapter in my web development adventures, showcasing the recent websites I’ve made for clients. So stay tuned for those!