This morning I was thinking about an artist who contracted me to design a website back in 1996. There was no off the shelf CMS to use, and JavaScript was not implemented in a way that made for a useful client side technology. Although server side includes and CGI were available, the company I worked for preferred to avoid using technologies that might put extra load on the web server.
The number of pages for the project was projected to be well over 100. Up until this point I'd been working on web sites that were mostly under 10 pages—they were little more than digital brochures and an email link. Maintaining them by hand was a straight-forward affair. But this project was going to require discovering a new approach.
As a self-taught designer and web developer, I didn't have a great approach to gathering requirements for the site. Looking back, I realize that the site should have taken a minimalist approach, but I thought it would be neat to have a textured brick background with some subtle lighting effects to make it appear as though the artist's work was hanged on a wall. Yep, I was into skeuomorphism before skeuomorphism was cool.
The artist's work was arranged in five or six galleries, each composed of 20-100 works. She had slides of each painting. Using a slide scanner, the images were converted into high resolution jpegs and stored on my computer, an Amiga 3000.
The design specification was to create a homepage that listed the galleries, paginated galleries with thumbnails of the art, and a navigable slideshow for each gallery. This had to be managed with minimum SSI (header and footer only) and no CGI. Also, no CSS, which was nascent in 1996 and that I personally avoided until designing the Otakurama website in 2001/2002.
The first challenge was to convert 200+ images into thumbnail versions and slideshow versions. To tackle this I used ImageFX, which was the Amiga equivalent of Photoshop. The batch conversion capabilities of ImageFX were extremely powerful, so much so that even Photoshop CS3 isn't in the same league. I was able to use ARexx to perform all the image conversions and save them with a directory and filename schema that was compatible with the website architecture.
Next was building 200+ slideshow pages. For that I used an HTML preprocessor called hsc, (HTML Sucks Completely) which I'm amazed to discover is still available in 2013 (and there's even a little hsc tutorial!). Using hsc, I was able to define templates for the paginated gallery pages and the slideshows and then assemble everything by running a script. The output of hsc is a complete website ready for deployment.
It took a few times to get the process right, but eventually I got it down to the point where if a site-wide change was necessary I could just find the spot in the template where the HTML was defined and fix it once, recompile the site, and redeploy. I felt so clever at the time. :)
In retrospect, I understood the design of the site needed to be separated from the content. It wasn't the way I'd learned to build websites, but it was a much better approach. I wasn't able to communicate how powerful this development process was to my employer—heck, I didn't grasp the idea in full at the time myself—but I grew dissatisfied developing websites the "old way" and a year later left web development for a technical support position that paid better. Hindsight, 20/20 right?
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