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:

The Wambooli web site from 1997. (Click to enlarge.)

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:

Wambooli from 2000. (Click to enlarge.)

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.

Wambooli from 2001. (Click to enlarge.)

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:

Wambooli starting in 2002. (Click to enlarge.)

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:

Wambooli 2005 begins to look more like it does today. (Click to enlarge.)

The current Wambooli web site has its design roots in 2008, which you can see by looking at the image below:

Wambooli in 2008, looking a lot like it does today. (Click to enlarge.)

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.