JAMI COFIELD  /  SEPTEMBER 1999

My First Home Page (March 1996)

I'm a junior in graphic design at a state university in Kansas. In August, cleaning out the desk in my old room at my parents' house, I found a floppy disk in a shoebox with JAMI WEB written on the label in purple gel pen. On it was the first home page I ever made, from March 1996, when I was sixteen: the HTML file and every one of its pictures.

I've put it back up, just as it was. Here it is, in all its glory:

My First Home Page, March 1996  →

Go look first. I'll wait. Then come back, and I'll walk you through it.

ITEM BY ITEM

The gray. I didn't choose gray. Netscape chose gray. I didn't know you could choose. When I learned about BGCOLOR a month later it felt like being told you could paint your bedroom ceiling.

The big centered welcome. An H1, centered, with three exclamation points. Everything on the page shouts, so nothing on the page is heard. I tell people in studio critique that their headline is fighting their body copy. In 1996 my headline was fighting the entire state of Kansas.

The spinning globe. It's there because it was the World Wide Web and I wanted it known that I was on it. It's also the real reason for best viewed with Netscape 2.0. Netscape 2.0 was the first browser that would play an animated GIF, and I needed you to see my globe spin.

The blink tag. *** THIS PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION ***, blinking. I switched to Internet Explorer this summer, which has never blinked anything, so on my own computer the old page sits perfectly still and I'd almost forgotten. In Netscape 4 it still blinks. I'm sorry.

The UNDER CONSTRUCTION sign. This is my favorite lesson on the whole page. The rainbow sign is 31K. The entire page, HTML and pictures together, is about 43K. So nearly three-quarters of what you had to download, on a 14.4 modem, was a picture telling you the page wasn't finished. It never was. No page ever is, and you don't need a sign to say so.

The NEW! signs. Five of them. One next to About Me, which had never been anything but new. Two on either side of Cool Links, so the heading was new twice. When everything is marked new, nothing is. I think about that every time I'm tempted to make three things on a poster bold.

My favorite bands. Smashing Pumpkins (NEW!, because I'd gotten Mellon Collie for Christmas), Alanis, Hootie, Oasis, Dave Matthews Band, Goo Goo Dolls. I stand by five of the six. I won't say which.

My friends. Bean, Squirrel, T-Bone, Lulu, Moose, Kitty and Spaz. Most of them still answer to it. Bean is getting married in June. Moose still owes me a dollar.

Cool Links. I took the links out and left the words. A couple of these places aren't there anymore, and the rest have changed so much they aren't the places I meant. What I remember is that Yahoo! was a list of the Web made by people, and I thought my list was the same kind of thing, just smaller. It was. That's what home pages were for.

The phone number. It said Or call me at and then my parents' phone number. I was sixteen, and I put my home phone number on the World Wide Web, right under my first and last name. Nobody ever called. My mother found out the next year, and I am still hearing about it. I've taken the number, my last name and my old school e-mail address off the restored page. Take yours off your page.

WHAT I'D KEEP

The nerve. I didn't know what a margin was, what a typeface was, or what anybody else would think, and I put it in front of the entire world anyway. Studio has taught me a lot of things, and one of them is how to be afraid of a blank page. Sixteen-year-old me wasn't. I'd like some of that back.

WHAT IT TAUGHT ME

View Source is the best teacher there is. Everything on that page I learned in Netscape by choosing View, Document Source on somebody else's page and figuring out which part did what. It's how I still learn. It's also why my source code is tidy now. Somebody sixteen might be reading it.

If everything is new, nothing is. That's hierarchy, the first thing they teach you in Design I, and I learned it from a 29-by-13-pixel red box.

Every picture costs your reader time. They're paying for it in seconds, and some of them are paying for it by the minute.

People know what blue and underlined means. My links are orange now, but I left them underlined. Don't make people guess what to click.

Somebody is going to read it. I thought I was making it for my friends. It turned out I was making it for whoever came along, which is a different job.

THEN AND NOW

HOW I WORK NOW

I start in my sketchbook, away from the computer, and I don't turn the computer on until I know what the page is for and what the one most important thing on it is. I set the type before I pick a single picture, because most of a page is reading. I choose one accent color and make it earn its place. I write the HTML by hand, I keep it short, and before anything goes up I look at it on a Mac and a PC, in Netscape and in Internet Explorer, and at 640 by 480, which is the size of the monitors in half the computer labs in this state.

And then I put it up, and I don't wait for it to be finished, because it never will be. That part I learned in 1996.

The counter is the one thing I kept from 1996. Some habits are load-bearing.
 since August 1999

Write to me: [email protected]
Last updated September 14, 1999
© 1999 Jami Cofield