Domain name firsts
~ 21 November 2006 ~
So I was renewing a few names last night and stumbled over the first name I ever registered: backpackstuff.com in May 1999, which led to this magnificent design as being the first I had ever created.
When and what was your first domain registered?
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My earliest web work that’s still online (the design for which is mostly unchanged) would have to be the Bredstik Entertainment site, which Stan and I designed over six years ago. What a long, strange trip it’s been…
ogogo.net, I had just turned 14.
I never really had a plan for it, I just thought I should have a website.
It’s only use as a test domain now (it’s easy to type). I’m such a dirty squatter.
Mine was the boring one that came with my ISP - I was experimenting with Pagemill at the time and though the sites look sophisticated they’d be rubbish if I looked at them now. My cat’s website was, however, revolutionary at the time (i.e. pictures of my cat)
The first site I worked on properly was www.plumbcenter.co.uk where I was the in-house designer. The site they’ve got now is pretty ropey compared to how I remember it and it looks like the techies finally won the day. Shame.
First one was alienabductions.com, record created 09-Sep-97.
The server that the site lived on finally gave up the ghost earlier this year — haven’t gotten around to bringing the site back online yet, but I’ve got to do it for historical reasons, if nothing else. :)
First one was one I still use today: http://markjreeves.com.
Web.archive.org will show that it’s suffered many attempts at design since that fateful day in a dorm room in 1998.
I registered JesterArt.com back in 2000 with Network Solutions for like $40. A result was the first logo I ever created
burned.com, created feb 21, 1997 when I was 13. I still don’t know exactly why I chose the name, but I’ve embraced it as my company name nonetheless.
http://kimblim.dk was the first domain I ever registered and it is still my primary domain for my blog. May 15th 2000 was the official date.. Time does fly by, because I remember quite clearly that I wasn’t sure which domain to register: my nickname (kimblim) or my real name (kimjohannesen)..
Oh, Cameron, I just *LOVE* your early work.
This is embarrassing! Projectfx.com, some time in 1998. The FX makes it so much cooler! I’m so glad I don’t have that domain anymore.
JorgenArnor.com, which is basically my name in Norwegian, was my first, back in 2001… Back then it redirected to a freehomepage.com-site.
Oh, those were the days…
reincarnatedwhale.com which expired many years ago. A web site for my SCUBA instructor father. One of my earlier projects I wish was still around.
Wow, I feel SOOOO much better about my early work after seeing yours! :)
My first domain was crystallinefaith.com in ‘99. I was a new Christian and I’m a huge fan of Fleetwood Mac so the name sort of encompassed both. I had a horrible FrontPage design and even a comic strip called “Crystal ‘n’ Faith” who were a Christian/atheist pair who talked about their differences in beliefs. It was all very Sybil-ish. :) I was such a dork.
My first was jwphill.com which I still have today. I registered it about 3 years ago.
playgroundblues.com :)
Early 2000 saw the purchase of but never realised: www.spinningsatellite.co.uk
Long forgotten reasoning behind the name and it’s accompanying tag line “A spinning satellite, but never a shooting star” - utter nonsense.
zymur.com in April of 99.
btw, maybe you can sell that backpack domain to 37S?
My first domain was mobcar.com registered 20-mar-1997.
I’ve scoured my backups looking for the first version, but it looks like versions 1.0-3.0 are lost to the sands of time.
Soon I’m going to put a museum of all the surviving versions up as a warts and all tour of how we all have to start somewhere.
I registered my first one just this summer: www.bluebreeze.net
Mine was www.nothing5cents.de and lead to http://home.arcor.de/nothing5cents/Home/Home.htm the homepage of my first band ;-)
My first was moondoggie.com, registered back in ‘97 or so. Network Solutions really hosed my registration back then and it gave me this more recent trendy ‘98 date, but I promise I’m old school!
Anyways, a day or two after I registered the domain after wanting it and putting it off for awhile, I received an email from someone who had also been putting off buying the name and got to the site a couple of hours after I did. Whew!
hotpepper.ca was my first.
A bit overwhelmed by all the Freeservers’ ads. Gotta love the IE-ish logo in the top right (if only I had known what troubles IE would bring to me in the future…)
Do you like my website?
I had one other, but registered my name (davesimon.com) in 1998.
I let my first domain lapse because I didn’t like it a few years after I registered it. It was 1997 when I registered it.
Pat - Had any lucrative offers for burned.com?
my first website ever was in 1995, back in the day of geocities (if anyone remembers). My address was something to the affect of:
http://www.geocities.com/area51/6673/index.htm
Did anyone else do the geocities craze? This was back when hotmail was brand new and not owned by MSN… ebay was just getting started… and microsofts website was terrible… remember now?
Haven’t stopped making them since. I only wish I jumped on the CSS train earlier than 1 year ago…
As for my first domain name, www.jaketone.com. Lasted 5 years, 2 of which were while i was on my mission so it didn’t get much use then.
No joke: The first web site I ever registered was www.peniscar.com.
At the time, I was a high school sophomore just playing around with web design. There was a scene in The Nutty Professor where Eddie Murphy hops into a red sports car with the license plate “PNS CAR”. Needless to say, a mocked up image of a license plate with PNS CAR became the logo. My friends thought it was great, and we mostly posted random gossip about our high school classmates.
Then I got in huge trouble with the school because of some zero-tolerance policy. Yeah, I was dumb back then, but it was fun to have that web site and several of my teachers would visit it during the school day to check in on the latest gossip.
MyS10.com. in May 99. “Home of Chevy S10 and GMC Sonoma Lovers Worldwide.”
Sold it a few years back…but it was my cherry popping website.
I bought detn8.org back in 1997. I built a dual Pentium-100 server running RedHat Linux and plugged it into one of the first Comcast cable modems available in the Baltimore area. I was in a town house with 2 other guys and used IP Masquerading (now known as NAT) to share the connection across 5 PCs in the house. It was my first and last experience with Linux… only because when I moved out, the server stayed and I no longer had a need for it.
I no longer own the domain and this is the farthest back InternetArchive goes that has my images stored as well:
http://web.archive.org/web/20011202161342/http://www.detn8.org/
I used to work for a small ISP and registered domains for customers. I don’t recall the first one I did, but I do remember having to ACK registrations and changes via email. That was no fun.
Would have been 1996.
Well, my first official domain registration was my name, which i’m still using, and you can click on my link to see it, but my first web site design was for the company that I worked for in the 90’s. Unfortunately, they haven’t changed the design since, but allowed a non web designer to make periodic updates to it. The result is predictable. http://www.columbia-ltg.com .
There’s one thing i’m still a little happy with about it though. The very first thing I did in flash is their sales network map. I still think it turned out pretty well: http://www.columbia-ltg.com/sales/salesnetwork.html
This fabulous site was an experiment in self-taught html back in ‘96.. I traded my “services” for a reserve parachute.. -er, a USED reserve parachute..
The owner hasn’t changed the look since then.. Note the fabulous Photoshop wizardry on the splash page..
I registered Alphadogstudios.com (no site anymore) in 1998 thinking I was going to start my own side business. That is, until I was informed by my boss that it was a conflict of interest. Whoops. Then I managed to grab my name.com. My job description has changed since then and I’ve started a new side business with the new boss’ approval but I haven’t registered the domain yet.
Cameron, unfortunately no. Still waiting on that cash cow.
biggreenminibus.com
Church youth group website I did about 6 years ago (http://web.archive.org/web/20010302050114/http://www.biggreenminibus.com/).
Special features of the frontpage 98 designed site included cool effect java buttons, frames.. nasty colour scheme. Still, that was the first website I did and now I do web development as a career.
hahndesign.com was my first domain, but my first site was a real doozy. I uploaded it to Snow College’s servers (which should tell you something right there….).
It was one page with a few images and a ton of links all pertaining to astronomy (for my astonomy class final project, see?) It was really bad (I painfully recall a ‘starry’ background image), but since it was 1995 I was all kinds of revolutionary.
I got totally into DJing in 1999 so I registered www.higherart.co.uk. I still have no idea what that has to do with DJing but it’s still live and still hosting my mixes, bizarrely (considering I do no gigs and no promotion) averaging about 30GB of downloads a month! I have no idea who downloads them but feel free to check them out! :-)
I never had a domain name for a few years after doing websites, but I’d always had the name ‘Suburbia’ inmind for my own personal site (now my blog at suburbia.org.uk).
This is a great nostalgic post as it reminded me of some of my early efforts which are still online from when I was a student at art college, it’s all still online as I’ve been at least a part-time employee ever since I graduated in 1997.
My original Suburbia site is found here: http://www.personal.dundee.ac.uk/~rjcurran/
The two main links there are to a skateboard article I wrote and also a travel diary I wrote whilst touring Western Australia (Note the use of ‘travel diary’ as opposed to ‘blog’!). The thing I like about the travel diary was a couple of maps I drew using only the trackball of my PowerBook 180 that I had then!
The first stuff I did was a site for my class at college called ‘Websight’! there’s still a version of that online too at: http://www.dundee.ac.uk/tvimaging/tba3/bodyparts/tba.htm
Wow, what a nostalgia trip!
My first was chrisandabby.com, back in Dec. ‘99, which I still use today. It’s gone under many a revision, but the current simple design will probably stay.
www.sikid-online.com, my first attempt at a HTML site (outside of Homestead!!) back in 2001ish. I was 15ish.
It had a splash page that included a recorded sound of me saying “sikid-online.com” I was on top of the world back then.
Don’t ask me where or why I chose sikid-online, I still don’t even know what a sikid was.
My first site and I’m embarassed to say the publication still uses the design,
http://marriageandfamilies.byu.edu
Oh, the days of image maps.
http://www.ethick.com registered back on 11-Nov-1999
It was always crap and it continues to be so.
Hey man, I’d buy a backpack. :)
Mine is Leon’s Wine & Liquor Center. Yup. Booze! It was redesigned once like in 2000…so I apologize that it’s not my very first.
Kingdomdesign.com in 1998. Remember when domains cost $70 for 2 years? I wish now I had bought the .net and .org.
My first domain was http://www.ehmotion.com
Me and a friend registered it to go along with our submission in to a local art show. After the show I kept the domain for myself and have been using the domain mostly for my email over the past 6 years or so.
I’ve never really done much with the domain itself, but recently have been using it for it’s subdomains.
http://portfolio.ehmotion.com and
http://lookingglass.ehmotion.com
my first domain is the only domain I still have. It is my own website, although the design has changed a few times since I first purchased it, just click on my name to see it.
That of course is not my first site I ever designed, and I can’t even remember the url, but it still exist somewhere out there in cyber space, on some free webspace with a cheasy ad banner streaming across the top portion of the site, which pushed my entire design down a few pixels which also resulted in destroying my entire design… blasted free sites!
It was 09-Jan-2000 when I registered PlanetMadDog.com for my personal blog. Twas the days when the web was new and scary, causing people to use aliases instead of their real names. Desperately in need of a redesign…
My first and only site I purchased for myself is my last name dot com. I purchased it first I believe in 2000 but just used it for family emails, I started to take pictures of my newborn in 2001 and made up a site to show them off in 2002. It is down right now and I am actually redoing it again. I think this would be leslein.com 6.1. I love seeing all my versions, archived at home, as I have slowly tried to change my techie mindset over the years.
The first and still currently used thinkworx.com.
Thanks for sharing your first site, you can see how far web design has come since 1999.
The first and main one I use for email is nocturnalmonkey.com in 2004. I won’t bore you with how that name came about.
The site went up shortly after I bought it then I got bored of the design and stupidly took the site down, hence the holding page currently displaying. It will be back up one day, once I decide what is to go on the site : )
the first one in 2000 - gurukulutsav.org - for myself, in early 2003 - ginytech.com -
@jake: IMO Microsoft’s website has always sucked, and I don’t just say that because I’m anti-MS! Too hard to find stuff and an unimpressive design :)
Cameron, it’s good to see we all came from the same web design roots…I’m sure your design for backpackstuff.com was cutting edge in those days! It’s hard to believe so much has changed in the 11 years I’ve been online. Funny enough, the first website I ever visited STILL looks like it did back in ‘97.
Oh yeah, the first domain I ever registered was for the company I worked for at the time, but it was lame because I just registered the .net and .org versions of our company name, they already had the .com.
My first domain ever was in fact www.zero-world.com, the very site I make my main living off today. Back in college, it was a site dedicated to bands, pubs and clubs in the Bath/Bristol area of the UK.Then when I went to uni, I used to it to host my photo galleries.
Two years ago I opened a clothing shop and we needed a name. We always intended to sell online eventually so we just used the domain name!
www.stinkbug.net in 2000.
I’m still using it for my personal website. I’ve thought about changing it many times, but I can’t find anything else that I like.
I originally wanted www.stinkbug.com, but at the time the guy wanted $20,000 for it (or it might have been $60,000, I can’t remember). I’ve kept an eye one it and as far as I know that the domain has never been used for anything and it still isn’t being used. I guess he’s decided to not let go of it though.
My first website was one of those ISP deals, but the first domain was the one I still use 2 years later: www.neilkelty.com. Although, I guess I did register http://www.terryhaffner.com before, but that wasn’t mine, so take your pick.
My first was firefusion.org. Can’t remember the exact date but it was 2000 and something.
My first domain was counterjumper.com which I registered back in 1999. I wish I had saved the very first version of it, but here is how it looked back in 2001. The first version was pretty similar to the 2001 version, except it had different colors
In 2002 I registered onwaarschijnlijk.org. ‘Onwaarschijnlijk’ means ‘improbable’; I got the domain for my graduation project in art school, which was about a fictional organisation called ‘The Institute for Improbable Interaction’. I’m still using this domain.
my first site was www.yooper.com it was a site for those who loved or lived in the U.P. of Michigan. Had it from 1998 to 2001 had many many visitors and thousands signed up for the mail list wish I would have kept it now as I probably could have made a lot of money from it.
Although I registered my first site in 1997 along with a couple of partners as a business venture, it has turned into a not for profit educational site. Medicinal Food News has gone through 3 or 4 web redesigns with improvements made along the way. It is nice to be able to see the changes were captured by http://web.archive.org/web/*/medicinalfoodnews.com
hehe, first domain was
ultimate-apple.com
not active no more, I belive I got it 94 and was a search engine for apple sites… Mmm the good times. there are some logged stuff at http://web.archive.org
First domain I registered was [myname].com. Of more interest…
My first site was a Geocities site which I must have built around 1997. College basketball links, mostly to ESPN SportsZone. A lot of animated, looping GIFs of stick figures dunking. Background image of the Boston Garden parquet.
I used Microsoft Frontpage Express (the free version that came with IE… 4?), which produced only the most standards-compliant HTML.
My first domain purchase was for personal use for people to stay connected with my wife and I:
theblancspot.com
My first was MadEejits.com, in Dec ‘99, which was to be a community site for Irish backpackers travelling around the world. A combination of getting a ‘real’ job and not yet having mastered database driven sites, so every page had to be created manually, eventually burried the plans.
For a while I used the domain to host test sites / early versions for client demos, now I just can’t bring myself to part with it.
The original logo still appears on the home page…
Registered my first domain cobbers.com on February 19, 1998.
Its main use in the beginning was as a sandbox for my web coding experiments.
It’s still going today, now as a blog for “Mates on a mission”.
I registered my first domain thepimp.com, way back on Sept. 11, 1997. I used it primarily to post pictures and information of nightclub events I was involved in. I’ve had a lot of offers on this one, just can’t seem to let it go.
It was cristinasmile.com that I bought to host a blog, but I now use Wordpress. At the time I was using Movable Type.
My first was chasethis.com which I was smart enough to register the first time before some hack turned it into a google adsense page
I registered my last name - iserloh.com - on boxing day 1999. At the time, most of my friends thought I was nuts… and narcissistic. But since then, everyone else has realized that domains are the new Internet real estate. In subsequent years, I have bought more than 50 other domains… before arriving at my latest purchase, BrightLaunch.com.
great topic!
Back in ‘97 I was doing an ad for a client imploring companies to get a good domain name ASAP, before they were all gobbled up. So I needed an awful domain name to show what will be left after all the good ones were gone, so I chose UsedWigs.com Pretty gross visual.
Just for fun, I registered the name. A year later, when I needed a domain to post some nonsense. I remembered I had the stupid domain and I thought, what the heck, use it. It’s an entertainment site and still chugging along many years later. Sadly the design and code have not been updated since then, hopefully soon!
A stellar example of ignoring all web standards:
My current site is the first domain I have ever registered :D
I think my first site I ever did was a personal fan page for Starcraft. Back in 98 when space backgrounds were hot, and yellow text went with everything. Man I miss those flashy animated gifs, and the scrolling banners. Perhaps web 3.0 will bring it all back in style!
I just covered this the other day as part of setting up my own bloggy-type thing.
Mine was from ‘97 - a diving school I was just getting involved with. The domain is still there today, although unfortunately I’m not as involved myself these days.
The site definitely went through a few evolutions, all visible with the waybackwhenmachine, and frankly quite scarey - but it was early days back then.
My very first domain, which I registered for myself, was LeLion.info.
It’s still online, although the design changed a bit;-)
Nice backpack website design, btw ;-)
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1 Mark ~ 21 November 2006
The first domain I ever registered was a .net domain of my name since the .com was already registered. I was so mad because the guy that had the .com wasn’t even using it… it was redirected to a geocities blank page.