My First Promotional Website As a Web Developer

This page shows a live example of the first promotional website I made when I started working as a freelance full-stack web and database developer/designer in 2001.

I'll write more about the site here soon, and also demo some of the other sites and projects I worked on around that time, and later on...

Embedded Website — Triangle Sun

Click on the Triangle Sun logo (towards the end of the animation) to enter the embedded website.

Because the sites from that era (this one was from 2001-2002) were made for much smaller screen resolutions, they look wrong on modern screens. I've embedded this one inside an 800 x 600 pixel iframe, so that it displays more like the proportions that it was meant to look like originally. I've avoided modifying the original site to look more modern and more "responsive" in terms of how it works on different devices' screens, because its meant to be shown here as basically a museum piece of what early 2000s internet was like.

The screenshot images inside individual portfolio pages within this site used to link to their live online versions, however this was 20 years ago, and technology has moved on since then, so most of the links have been removed. I may re-host some more of these websites on here in future (with proprietary information removed), in a partial form, as demonstrations.

Some of the contact details (which are no longer valid) have also been changed (e.g. zeroes inserted into some of the phone numbers).

The animated Macromedia/Adobe Flash content is run here using a Flash emulator called Ruffle.

Alternative View of the Triangle Sun Website

Another option for viewing the website is to load the site as it's own page. Depending on the type of device and browser you're using, this may look okay, or maybe the proportions may look all wrong — since the website was only ever designed for 800 x 600 screen resolution (or maybe 1024 x 768 which was about the largest screen resolution anyone used back then). Depending on your device, and browser, and screen size, it might even look better when loaded in its own window than when viewed in the iframe embedded in the page you're reading now.

You can load the Triangle Sun website in it's own window from this link here.

Second Alternative View, Scaled to 200%

I made a "wrapper" HTML page to load the original site within it, scaled to 200% of the pixel size of the original. This might look more correctly in proportion on some newer devices and screens. Yet the graphics look much worse at 200% magnification since they were designed to be half the resolution, and have been artificially magnified using CSS for this version.

Click here to view the Triangle Sun website scaled to 200% using CSS.

Macromedia/Adobe Flash

The animated Flash intro was a popular style around 2001. There's also an example of a cartoon-like Flash animation on the "Animation" page inside the embedded website (which I originally wrote as a TAFE assessment). This "Alien" animation is meant to have sound — the sound is working for me currently in Chrome and Edge, but not in Firefox. The cover-page "Triangle Sunrise" animation isn't meant to have any sound.

Since Flash had so many security issues it was discontinued, though it can be emulated now using Ruffle (which is written in the programming language Rust, and compiled to Web Assembly).

Website Portfolio

Inside the embedded website, in the "Portfolio" section, you can see some examples of sites I made for clients around that time. It says "We have built complete websites for prices ranging from $500 to over $25,000", which was correct at the time. I did a larger one later, which was more like $40,000 for a single website (and that was in early 2000s money).

Eventually, I'll showcase some of the details of those sites more fully on this website.

Client Feedback

"I can't tell you how much I am overwhelmed at the quality and how well that you have interpreted the brief. This is really fantastic."

"Thanks for all your help on the website... Everyone was very impressed with how professional our approach was (which essentially came down to our website)."

"I have been pleased with your work on this project and if the opportunity arises, I would use Triangle Sun again in the future."

"Love it!! Very happy vegemite!! Thanks for that!"

Partnership

The business was legally set up as a partnership between myself and my then-girlfriend. She had no IT background at all, and was doing a TAFE course in Website Production for most of the time I was working on these sites. Eventually she completed the course, and then we broke up due to relationship problems. So the websites here are basically all my own work — though being a partnership allowed the use of the plural "we" in the promotional material, and made the business appear larger than it actually was.

My physical home address for much of that time was a flat above a shop, in the shopping centre of McMahons Point, near North Sydney. This also helped with appearances, as my address sounded like a commercial address. Since it basically was a commercial address, in the sense that the street number was a commercial building in the "CBD" of McMahons Point.

Coming Soon

Many more live examples of coding, web and database development, and security work to be added to this website soon...

I'll also write about some of the technology used then, and now — and how things have changed over the 20 years from 2001 to 2021.

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