So the first years, right... Well when I started my site I actually didn't know much about the Internet, and most certainly didn't know much about making a web page. Geocities offered a "page builder" utility that would pretty much make a web site for you. While it seems archaic now, at the time that was an almost unheard of service. Eventually I got adventurous enough to actually learn HTML, and started to experiment with switching some things around. I ended up dealing with the legacy of the Geocities page builder for many years however.

Well I still have fond memories of most of these page layouts. For their time some of them were rather cutting edge and much better than many of the personal web sites out there. Also keep in mind that 1) Most people had dialup modems that were SLOWER than 56k so big pictures were out. 2) Netscape 3 was the most popular browser at the time and had many issues. 3) Making a page that was TOO big and complex would often crash a person's machine on your site - and no I'm not kidding.

Everyone has to start from somewhere. I was just happy to get an inline image on the page at the time. Eventually I learned tricks like aligning images. The New Zealand flag is a legacy from Geocities image collection. For the first few months my site was called Archen Sailor Moon. My goal at the time was to make two DIFFERENT pages (one for the Sailor Scouts & one for the Negaverse). I also wanted to eventually receive 500 hits (back then the Internet wasn't so popular so getting traffic was a difficult task). I added a section on "other anime I liked".

By this time I had gone through lots of format changes, which was basically just re-arranging small bits of HTML on the main page. For the move to animanga I totally redesigned the site and came up with this format which I'm still very fond of. I always thought it looked very simple, yet charming. At the time I made just about all my pages (except individual series pages) white, which is why a lot of my pages are STILL white. By this time my site had expanded to the point where it was larger than your average anime page. Oddly enough I got more mail about my page back then, than I do now.

My newest page at the time was for Neon Genesis Evangelion, which I had just uploaded to Geocities when they started adding pop-up ads to every page. Some of the really old pages are (nearly) the same as they were on Geocities.

By the time I got to where I am now, I had played a bit of server hop-scotch, but I eventually landed my site at scythe.net. I managed to corral much of my site organization wise, so it's easier to navigate despite being bigger. Now days I spend as much time on formatting my pages to look interesting, as I spend writing them to BE interesting. I finally feel somewhat happy with what my page is. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it in the future, but I'm sure it will continue to grow in some shape or form.

You could say that 1999 was the year of death (as far as visits go - which was down 45%), and 2000 was the year of rebirth (as far as old pages go) - nice Eva tie in huh?. Many of my old pages were rotated out in favor of newer ones. Quite a bit of my page was updated, and even the last legacy page from Geocities was thrown out (redone actually). I've pretty much totally immersed the site in the theme: "a resource for uncommon anime".