Take a trip down memory lane and see how the site you know as 100% Melanie C
began...waaay back to November 1996. For those of you in the UK, you may
just recall this was the time when the most popular question to ask anyone
was "who's your favourite Spice Girl?". Oddly enough, even though people
were asking me this question, as soon as I answered "Melanie C" they'd go "who?".
I suspect they were expecting me to be predictable and say Geri or Emma...
Anyway, since some of these questioners were online, I decided to partly solve
this non-recognition problem by adding a few pics of Melanie to my website. Then,
when the next person to ask went "who?" I could just say "there's a photo of
her on my website, go see for yourself...". And it worked.
I figured that would be it, but life is never that simple. And life online
is particularly good at being anything but simple. So once I'd started adding
pics of her to my site, I couldn't stop. And then came the odd one or two
bits of info I'd gathered about her, and before I knew where I was, one
little Melanie C page had turned into two not-so-little ones...
The pages slowly grew during the remainder of November and December, and eventually
I decided to split them away from the rest of my website, giving them a directory
of their own and treating them as a separate site. During the Christmas/New Year
vacation I had the chance to completely re-work the pages, improving the HMTL
and giving them a cleaner look. And since Santa had left a scanner under the
tree for me, I had plenty of new photos to add :-) So returning to the University
and thus my net access in early January, I had quite a lot of new stuff to upload -
including a name for the site - "100% Melanie C"
January to March saw more and more visitors arriving, and more and more work
on my part to keep the site fresh, especially given the increased amount of
Spice stuff in the media. Unfortunately, near the end of March the traffic
levels had grown to such a level that the University decided they could no
longer host the site on their server, and asked me to remove it. Well, I
wasn't prepared to just throw away 5 months of work, so 3 weeks of searching
revealed a webspace provider with near perfect facilities, and the site was
reopened in mid April.
Since then, the site has grown, and grown, and grown. Visitor numbers have done
likewise, and although they're down on their peak levels of mid-1998, the site still
gets more visits per week than it did in total before the move.
Enough of the waffle, you want to see what the "site" looked like all those
months ago, so here it is!
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| 1996 |
1997 |
1998 |
1999 |
2000 |
2001 |
November
23rd: First pictures of Melanie added to my website.
December
22nd: Gave pages their own directory tree, creating a
mini-site separate from the main website.
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