dannycox.me.uk

Welcome

Welcome to the history of me on the internet. This website contains the results of all the polls ever conducted on the "main" part of my old website, as well as all the contact messages I was allowed to publish and all the guestbook entries.

Danny Cox's Official Website: 2004 - 2008

Here's a brief history of the stupidly-named D.C.O.W.S. in screenshots of its many incarnations. Click the images to view them and accompanying text:

Way back in 2004 I decided I wanted to create a website, so I did. In Microsoft Word. Needless to say, it was terrible. It had some stuff about The Sims 1 in it, a lot of which is still around today on Danny’s The Sims Website, but that was about it. Unfortunately, this design only looked right at one screen resolution, which got a bit annoying after a while. So I simplified it……which resulted in this. I was using Microsoft FrontPage by this point, and had discovered an animation feature. It looked great when it actually worked. I tried to get around problems with it by creating versions of every page with and without the animations, but after a while I decided to redesign the site again…Unfortunately the photo of me is missing – I’m not sure what happened to it – but it was probably horrible anyway. I went through two or three designs similar to this, adding fancy buttons and moving things around a bit, while in the process adding sections for Half-Life (featuring most of what you’ll find in my Half-Life Information archive website today, including the first three chapters of the walkthrough) and my first poll (asking whether you’ll buy The Sims 2 - results are available in the Polls section). Then I worked out how to use frames…“Frames are brilliant”, I thought, “they mean I don’t have to edit every page when I want to change a menu!” This image actually shows the last “iteration” of this design – how it looked when the next overhaul launched. I didn’t make a copy every time I made a change, so I can’t show you any other “iterations”. Anyway, in between launching the first frame design and launching the one in the next image, I added sections for Half-Life 2, Opposing Force and playable games, and separated the The Sims stuff into their own website so I could add it to the official website’s fan-site list. Thus, this became the “main website”. In 2005, I decided it was time for a change…With this design, which is thankfully a bit less overpoweringly blue (though still frame-based – the bit in between the two silver-grey boxes is a frame) the Half-Life stuff split off onto their own website too, leaving the main website to just be about polls, playable games, and stuff for fellow Ashby School students to (never) use. In late 2006, I decided the games and Ashby School stuff were better off on their own websites as well, and a website with just polls on it was a bit pointless, so I created what ended up being the last version of Danny Cox’s Official Website…This is how the website looked like just before it was taken off the web in 2008. Like the main page on dannycox.me.uk today, it basically just linked to the sub-websites, with the “main website” only consisting of this page, plus some pages for contacting me, which were basically the same as the ones on dannycox.me.uk now.