Web-Busters was a web design company in Huntingdonshire. It is the oldest thing on this site by five years, and until now it wasn't on it at all.
The company's own about page, written in 2001, puts it better than I would now:
Web-busters was set up by Chris Davis, Des Thresh & Rob King because we were so disillusioned with so many of the bland, boring & unattractive sites that we were seeing when we surfed the net.
So with Chris's information technology & programming skill's & Des & Robs design flair, the three decided to set up WEB-BUSTERS.
That division held. They decided what it should look like; I made the browser do it.
Everything was hand-written HTML in a text editor. Tables for layout, spacer GIFs, a separate graphic for every button because there was no other way to have a font you'd chosen. The homepage was a 700×800 Flash movie, and because Flash 5 was a plugin rather than a given, there were two routes into the site — one for people who had it and one for people who didn't. You asked visitors which kind of computer they had before you showed them anything.
The styling is the part that dates it hardest. Drop shadows were done with
filter: blur() dropshadow(), which was Internet Explorer only, so the site quietly looked
different depending on what you opened it in and nobody thought that was strange. The scrollbar was
gold and violet, because you could do that then. There was a hit counter from thecounter.com with a
script beside it reading screen.colorDepth and navigator.javaEnabled(), and
a branch specifically for Netscape 2.
The clients were local businesses and small traders: a Chinese cultural site, a shopping directory, a Dutch importer, an electrician, a company that laid driveways and decking, a garden centre, and an information site for the county itself.
The price list was printed on the site, which is something almost nobody does now. A two-page website was £150. Four pages and eight graphics was £500. Extra animated graphics were £30 each. And under Extras, available at time of purchase:
Hit Counter (a must!) £15.00
Background Music £15.00 for 1st Page, £10.00 every page after
Sounds £10.00 per Item
Special Effects Price on Request
Background music, per page. I have thought about that price list more than is reasonable.
The detail I like most is in the markup rather than on the page. Every document carried the
generator meta tag that authoring tools write into your HTML to advertise themselves —
except these ones didn't say FrontPage or Dreamweaver. They said:
<meta name="generator" content="The Mind, Body and Soul of Chris Davis">
Twenty-five years later the tools are different and the work is Rust and Metal and shaders, but the shape of it hasn't changed much: someone decides what it should feel like, and I make the machine agree.
The company is long gone. The domain passed to a travel agency in Scotland somewhere in the 2000s, and today it doesn't resolve at all, so there is nothing to link to but the archive. These are the snapshots the Internet Archive kept:
- The site as it stood in December 2001 — this one still renders
- The July 2001 homepage, with the Flash splash and the choice of routes