Oops! I forgot, but last Monday was marked the end of the 14th year that the Wambooli web site has been up on the Internet.
Wambooli first went live in 1996. It was coupled with the launch of my beginner’s web book, Web Wambooli.
The problem with Web Wambooli was that it was about two years too late to market. Otherwise, it was a good book, well-laid out, nice illustrations, and it received many positive reviews. But timing is important when it comes to technology publishing.
Here’s an early picture of the Wambooli web site from 1997, courtesy of the Web Wayback Machine:
By the year 2000, I had changed the Wambooli site to cover all of my books. I experimented with laying out the site in Adobe GoLive. I put on way too many graphics. Here’s a peek from April of 2000:
I remember Wambooli having the same look (shown below) for way too long a time. This was between 2000 and 2002. There were many, many pages and each one was done individually. (That was before I learned PHP and MySQL.) It was a pain to update, so basically I didn’t update the site.
Starting in 2002, the Wambooli web page began to look sort of like it does now. There are the two columns, left and right, plus information at the top, including an updating tip-of-the-day (which I still have, but which is disabled), and other updating information:
The Wambooli morph continued in 2005. Look at the link for the Forums. Does anyone remember the Forums? It’s getting really close to the way it looks today:
The current Wambooli web site has its design roots in 2008, which you can see by looking at the image below:
What I’m not showing, and what would take up a lot of room, would be the internal redesigns that Wambooli has been through over the years. Even today, I’m constantly customizing the internal pages on the site, trying to keep them consistent and usable.
Happy birthday Wambooli
Comment by chiefnoobie — November 4, 2010 @ 12:11 pm
Thanks. It’s tough dealing with all these teenagers…
Comment by admin — November 4, 2010 @ 12:26 pm
I miss your fake ads, like the one in the first picture. Why aren’t those on the site anymore?
Comment by gamerguy473 — November 4, 2010 @ 4:39 pm
I published the list back in April: http://www.wambooli.com/blog/?p=1510
The ads have no relevance any more because Web advertising has changed. It’s now all that flash nonsense, which is annoying enough that I don’t need to make fun of it.
Comment by admin — November 4, 2010 @ 5:05 pm
I asked the same question in that post too. Whoops!
Comment by gamerguy473 — November 5, 2010 @ 10:55 am