I have maintained a web presence ever since I first got online in 1997.
At first I used various "homepage maker" sites; these allowed a single-page design where you could enter text and pick from a fixed set of images. In 1999 I finally got a net connection at home and 10 MB webspace provided by my ISP. I started making pages, mostly about my programming projects.
I still remember when the entirety of this guy's site was a black background and a poorly-drawn picture of some freakish face with the word "HUNGRY" below it. - Lumina Dragon in rec.games.computer.ultima.dragons
Sadly, nothing remains of these. I have almost no files from before 2001 that have survived moving between different harddrives and they're not archived anywhere I know of.
(I actually made 500 SEK in 1998 from designing a homepage for a local paint store. That one can be found on the Wayback Machine, but it looks like shit so let's pretend it never happened.)
I started out with Adobe PageMill that was popular at the time. It was a lot easier to work with than MS FrontPage. I later learned to do manual HTML and CSS.
At this point I was outgrowing of my ISP account. My focus had switched to music and 10 MB was very limiting when I wanted to distribute mp3s, but the biggest problem was they only allowed static content. I was given an account on a private server by an IRC contact ("unlimited" space and PHP was such an unbelievable luxury at the time). After moving to attend university I hosted my own server in a closet, but this proved impractical for several reasons so instead I moved my page to the local "computer club". This was followed by another move a couple years later, to the private server of yet another IRC contact.
In 2010 I registered happyponyland.net and finally got a stable URL. In 2017 I dropped my webhost and am now hosting it on a VPS.
Old Designs
These are some old designs I've been able to dig up. With pathnames like old_2009-05-22/old_www/restricted/to8/ and RETIRED/old_cd2/hemsida/, they've been around for a while.
"Hand coded in emacs"? Oh yeah, and those terrible cjb.net URLs. Better than using home.isp.net/~xSzu4w-U4on/ I guess.
At some point I dropped the capitals...
... and started doing all kinds of edgy::minimalist::design in "Matrix" colors.
Splash/index screen for the page above. That lamp was actually a pretty clever idea. I had recently bought my first digital camera and was trying out a lot of stuff with it.
Once I got into PHP I went completely overboard with the scripting, just because I could. I got a lot of stuff automated that did not really benefit from being automated, but it was a time for learning and experiments.
For my "potatoes" chiptune label:
I'm quite pleased with this design, it was stylish and actually had a coherent theme. That rubber duck was a photo I took myself.
Super edgy web design, 2003. I was not feeling well in my late teens. All my writing from this time is pompous at best, downright insane ramblings at worst. I can't entirely dismiss it as an age thing though, since a lot of the alienation I felt at that time has still stuck with me for most of my life.
Another netlabel I was trying to start up. It was never officially launched and "machine within" instead became a SKRAEKTEATERN release.
At some point I just stopped caring. Not sure what I was thinking with the blue-on-black; it might be missing a .css file.
A small index page from around the same time. It looks slightly more positive, but what's up with these crazy hue-shifted photos?
In 2004 I settled on very basic design which is still in use today. I've changed the stylesheet a couple of times, but the basic structure and a lot of the content has been retained over 10+ years!
(This particular backup is from 2006; I was still mostly focusing on my music.)
