I am far from a web-designing genius. My computer knowledge is solely self-taught, with a few tips and tricks from grade 9 and 10 business tech class thrown in, but anyone who has ever taken these classes will know that's not much.
My experience with web-designing began over the summer of 1998. I had just gotten the internet, was going into grade 5, and had recently learned, via the magazine Nintendo Power, about an upcoming game called "Pokémon" that was apparantly a huge hit in Japan. My best friend Anita and her siblings, who had the Internet before me, had all cultivated their own websites using Geocities, and I was eager to begin my own. Now, at the time, no one knew what Pokémon was, so I decided to make a fansite for it, and naturally, I went right for Geocities.
However, because of some law Clinton apparantly signed, Geocities refused to give me an account because I was under 13. After growing temporarily enraged, I created a new e-mail account and lied about my age, taking in the other Clinton spirit of "don't ask, don't tell." But I found the Geocities editor to be intimidating and confusing. I didn't want to learn HTML, dammit, I wanted this thing handed to me on a platter! I mean, when you buy a video game, you don't read the manual - you jump right into it and assume the game will tell you anything important.
I had almost given up on website design forever, when I stumbled upon...ANGELFIRE. At the time the free hosting service was small and unintimidating. Using their "Basic Editor," which spells out everything for you, I was able to get started.
Next, was the task of HTML. Because I couldn't figure out how to use paragraphs, everytime I typed something, it would end up as a massive block of text. So there it was, my first website: a single, colourless, pictureless block o' text o' fifth grade writing skills. In retrospect, it was really only a few steps beneath this page. But eventually, by skimming through FAQs and learning a magical little technique called "view source," I was able to BS my way into having a vaguely appealing, functioning website.
Aside from learning how to make a table for the music reviews page, my web design skills remain unchanged since the sixth grade.
Yes, Angelfire was once a tiny little hosting service - one that didn't even force you to have pop-up ads! Best of all, it was extremely user-friendly. But over the past 7 years, it has been bought out repeatedly by a number of shadowy corporations, each one more frightening than the last!
First, they announced that they were getting too big to pay for all this free hosting, so ads were necessary. However, they were still nice enough to give us a choice between the pop-up sort and the stuck-on-your-site type.
But then, in a 1984-esque move, they briefly upped the amount of storage space on each website to 50 MB, only to cut it back to 20 MB within months. Personally, I can't remember how much space each individual site was given before the brief increase, but I have a vague memory of it being more than 20 MB. And the moment they were bought out by Lycos, suddenly, you had to sign up for a Lycos username that made logins confusing.
They also went from being userfriendly to all-out assholes. Numerous fellow Pokémon websites were shut down because they had pictures, and Angelfire didn't want them using pictures with a Nintendo likeness on them, even if the person had made the picture themselves. Now, it's always possible that Nintendo themselves, being a giant corporation, was behind this. However, Nintendo always gave a vast amount of encouragement to fansites, and why not? Why pay huge sums to hype your product when kids can do it for you? In fact, back when they had "game counselors," one of them thanked me on my website's ooooold message board for making the website. And considering the forerunner Pokémon websites (aka kids who could afford their own domain names) were not hit with similar cease-and-desist letters, something tells me this was just some bizarre, random purging Angelfire came up with for some reason.
Finally, you were no longer even given a choice between ads. Ads attacked your website, from above, beneath, and flying madly at you. Even since I got this website 2 years ago, the number of ads has increased. My personal favourite are the ones that scan what text is on the page, then give you ads based on that keyword. If you visit my rant on goths, you will probably be bombared with ads for gothic clothing.
Now, I will take a moment to mention that yes, Angelfire has learned from their mistakes, and I did actually have a userfriendly experience with them recently. When I forgot the password to my Pokémon site a year or so ago, long after I stopped updating it, I realized I could not retrieve it because the e-mail I had signed up for the site with was defunct. I e-mailed Angelfire explaining my dilemma and asking for the password, but acknowledged that I would probably never be able to get into my website again, because a) Angelfire, based on my past experiences, did not seem like the type of service to go out of its way for you, and b) even a kindly service would probably not give it to me, because I had no way of proving I was really the site owner. However, to my surprise, they promptly e-mailed me back with my password.
I will also acknowledge that, considering I am not paying for any of this, I probably really have no right to complain. But the truth is, it just comes back to an indie rock-esque elitism: damn it all, I was there when this thing was cool, and I want it back, no matter how impossible that is! The corruption of Angelfire, however inevitable, is just an allegory for how we all are endlessly getting sold out by increasingly large corporations beyond any will of our own. And, while I'm happy that they were friendly to me the last time I needed something from them, based on my previous experiences, I wouldn't be surprised if this rant gets me shut down.
So screw it, I'm putting a damn Pokémon likeness at the top.