I first started building websites while attending secondary school at a time when the internet was a relativly a new thing to the mainstream PC user. Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace didn't even exist yet and ones which were just taking off like FaceParty and ProfileHeaven were very limited in the information you include and the photos you could upload. With this in mind, a website for me seemed like the best way to share information about myself and post photos for everyone to see with pretty much unlimited customisation.
Version 1.0 - www.geocites.com/jonnyc268
Being young and stupid, I had little interest in learning HTML code as I simply wanted to make something that looked good. At this time, Yahoo! offered a free website building and hosting service called Geocities which in its day was the most popular WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) online website builder and in comparsion to alternative free packages was the best all round in terms of diskspace and bandwidth.
The design of the website was every simple with a navigation panel down the left-hand side and the content to the right. Its content was very bare due to laziness and only consisted of about 5 pages that were mostly taken up with photos.
After about a year slowly died because of the lack of updates as it was very much a static website (nothing really needed to change). In addition to lack of updates, Yahoo! decided to include more and more advertising banners, eventually placing them in a seprate grame which became very annoying. The main problem was the poor amount of control I had on the position of the layout and the limits on what styles I could use (e.g. colours, fonts, etc). Despite all of its flaws, the one worth while thing that it brought was to increase my interest in wanted to webdesign and the spark to build a better, more sophisticated website.
Version 2.0 - www.jonny2608.co.uk
In 2004 after finishing secondary school and before starting college, I decided to scrap everything and start from scratch; no more GeoCities or 'drag-and-drop' website building and instead opted to learn HTML. The reason I choose to learn and direclty code in HTML rather than using the more conventional and easier method of using a website development software package such as Dreamweaver was so I could under how websites are structured and layed out from the ground-up. It also made me feel like I had greater control over the code as I would understand what each line does.
This website was the first to take the name of 'Jonny's Website' and can be seen to be the first iteration in the development of the style which is still used on the latest version. The most noticable different this and the previous version is the layout which changed from a side navigation bar to a top as this suits websites with a narrower margin of categories. It was also a lot large in the amount of pages and content.
Two years I began to increasly become more and more bored and flustrated with maintaining it. I got bored of updating it as simple tasks like adding new pages became tedious due to no CSS being used to style the mark-up code and so one change somewhere meant having to manually change everything else where. Likewise, I never used PHP so if made a change to the layout or structure to one page (such as the header or footer) to keep them looking the same I would have to make the same change on every single other page. Very annoying and so it slowly died.
Version 3.0 - www.jonnyswebsite.co.uk
Started writing on and off between June 2008 and August 2009, version 3 of my website had a completely new approach to it. I decided that every page must be XHTML/CSS complacant and be easy for me to maintain. I also shelled out a bit of money (very rare of me to do so) and bought some web hosting, domain names and FTP client software. For the first time ever I had used CSS/PHP just about anywhere and everwhere I could to make it as easy to update and maintain as possible.
Version 4.0 - www.jonnyswebsite.co.uk
Version 4 keeps the original carbon-fibre look, header artwork and navigation, but rebuilds the site as a responsive Blazor web app. Photo albums can be stored as XML
(as they were in v3) or in a SQLite database, with a config setting choosing which format the site reads at runtime. Older albumInfo.txt files were converted to XML
and backfilled into SQLite, and a PowerShell script at the solution root can sync the two formats either way.