You know when you get sucked down a YouTube black hole? I’ve wasted many evenings this way; one video leads to another, then another. The Wayback Machine is a bit like this. It’s addictive to look at the web of my youth.
Even more additive is looking back over the questionable design decisions I’ve made. It’s like looking at old photos of myself: nostalgic but often cringe-worthy.
2001
This site started life when I was at University as a Flash playground. When I say Flash, I mean the Macromedia kind, not the Adobe kind that nearly killed the mobile web.
At the time, tiny popup windows were de rigueur on the web. My site was no different, presenting the user with a homepage that invited them to “click to open roobottom.com”. It’s a shame I never kept a copy, as the popup wasn’t archived.
Looking back on this reminds me of how the early web felt—filled with possibilities. There weren’t any social media sites. People who were online had their own spaces, all unique and experimental.
Oh, and yes, that’s a photo of me aged around six months.
2004
After university, my site lay largely abandoned. I tried a few things but couldn’t recapture the zest for building web pages. That was until WordPress in 2004 and a newfound love of blogging. I must’ve liked blue because I remember many of my web designs being blue — and my site was no exception: A riot in monotone.
I started writing and never really stopped.
2006
In 2006, I abandoned all that work and moved my portfolio to roodesign to focus on writing stuff—and what stuff it was! I ramped up the volume of rubbish writing.
There’s a whole host of things that date this design. From the web-safe font stack to the FamFamFam icons, it screams’ noughties.
I’d forgotten about the old Multipack logo. I moved south around this time, so I never really got involved in the community, but I was one of the founding members. It started with me, Paul and Si in a grotty pub in Walsall.
I liked this design and kept it for the next seven years. I made minor updates around 2008, but the overall aesthetic stayed the same.
2013
Sometimes, you get a haircut you regret. It makes sense at the time. It’s new and exciting, and you think it’ll make you look cool. But it won’t. It’ll make you look like an asshole. In 2013, I redesigned my website.
2014
I quickly realised my error and corrected it—I still really like elements of this design from 2014, especially the brick wall effect galleries.
By now, I’d abandoned WordPress in favour of Jekyll, mainly for the free hosting on Github Pages. It was a great introduction to static site generators, even if each build took around two minutes to complete.
2016
In 2016, this site went minimalist.
I built my first design system, or “pattern library”. I spent a lot of time thinking about Firefly’s pattern library, so it was natural to take a “patterns first” approach when designing my website.
I built a horrendous-to-maintain build script using Gulp. This was also the first time I used Nunjucks as a templating language, something I’ve used on every version of this site since.
2018
Apple introduced dark mode across all their operating systems in 2018. This was exciting for web developers who could now respect users’ system settings and present a dark version of their website when the user activated dark mode.
I faithfully designed a light and dark version of my site.
But I really didn’t like the light version. At all. So I put it in the bin and only built the dark version.
2020
Pastels! That’s right. You like 'em? We got 'em!
I embraced pastels in a big way over several iterations of this site, starting in 2020.
The big change over this time was the reintroduction of my diary, where I could post about my family’s day-to-day life.
2022 onwards
Since launching the 2020 design , I haven’t done any big-bang redesigns. Instead, the overall design aesthetic morphed over time into the website you see today.
Over several more iterations, I reduced the colours, eventually arriving at a monotone design. Recently, I’ve reintroduced some splashes of colour here and there. The site is better for it.
I’ve rearchitected the back-end several times during this period, but the basic design has remained the same.
That is, until today. I’ve just launched a feature that allows you to choose a style inspired by a classic design. Give it a go; I’d love to hear which one you like best.