AAP: The Early Years

When I started, I didn't know much about the Internet, and certainly didn't know how to make web pages. Geocities offered a page builder utility that would make websites for you, which was pretty innovative for its time. Eventually I became adventurous enough to learn HTML, and experimented with switching things around. I had to cope with the legacy code of the Geocities page builder for many years however.

For their time some designs were cutting edge, keeping in mind: 1) Many people had dialup modems SLOWER than 56k, so big pictures were out. 2) Netscape 3 was the most popular browser and had many MANY issues. 3) Making a page TOO big and complex could crash a person's computer - no I'm not kidding.

Everyone has to start from somewhere. I was just happy to get an image on the page. Eventually I learned tricks like how to align them. The New Zealand flag is from the Geocities image collection, because I was like "Oh more stuff to add!". For the first few months my site was called Archen Sailor Moon. My goal was to make two different pages (one for the Sailor Scouts & one for the Negaverse). Another goal was to receive 500 hits. The Internet wasn't as popular, so getting traffic was a difficult task. To this day, these are the only goals I set for my website. Later, I added a section called "other anime I like".

By this time, I'd done many formating changes by re-arranging small bits of HTML on the main page. For the move to animanga.com I re-vamped the main page with this format. As weird as it sounds, a lot of people did major site layout changes quite often, even though that was a tremendous amount of effort considering many people also did websites by hand (so to speak). I had a guestbook (from Guestworld) and web counter. My site had it all! But no web ring. I had one of those on my Geocities site, and I already knew what a disaster those were. My site had already grown to be bigger than other anime pages.

My newest page was for Neon Genesis Evangelion. 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 this time I my site had moved again to belldandy.net, then again to scythe.net. I realized my site had become an orginizational disaster and attempted to make it easier to navigate. "Success" is in the eye of the beholder for that. I finally felt somewhat satisfied with my site. I wasn't sure where it would go in the future, but knew it would keep growing.

1999 was the death (as far as visits go - down 45%), and 2000 was rebirth (as far as old pages go) - nice Eva tie in huh?. Instead of just adding pages, I rotated outdated ones out as new ones were added. I concentrated on the theme: "a resource for uncommon anime".