Lancaster University didn't have a proper website until 1997. It had a dreadful mess with no structure and a jagged version of the University logo haphazardly propped up in the top right hand side of the home page. This was because for about four years, it had no one in charge, and information was just added to it, with no thought of how it would look as a whole. It was terrible, and on one occasion american students took the time to email the Computer Centre from their home university to ridicule it. It was so bad in fact, that the new Information Officer, Alasdair McKee decided that the University could not wait for the outcome of the World Wide Web Working Committee that had been meeting for some years, and it was decided to create a proper one ourselves.

The site shown was basically my design, and though there are flaws in it, I believe that for the day, it wasn't that bad, in part because of it was an original design, nothing like any of the other University websites. it was graphically in the same league as others of the time - this was a LONG time ago - but it was quite slow to load, and so was only ever a stop-gap on the way to something better. Alasdair provided an editorial role and managed the project, and together we put together a structure under this front page out of the total shambles that had previously existed, and which had come together with no overall design. We mirrored in content as closely as possible the paper prospectus of the day.

The overall purpose of the design is to show Lancaster at the centre of the nation by emphasising its central geographic position within the British mainland. Americans students I knew then, for example, considered Lancaster to be a suburb of Manchester, and liked being able to pop up to Edinburgh or down to london for a weekend. The graticules serve to draw the eye to the centre of the island of Britain - which is only a few miles south of Lancaster.  I put in the academic crest, used on all of the University's academic material at the time as well as putting in the later 'swoosh' logo which is used for marketing purposes. Later designs didn't use the academic crest but the Uni had a somewhat confused identity at the time and we didn't want to tread on peoples' toes.

The home page was also pretty primitive because we deliberately used only things that would work on old browsers, in order to broaden our audience as much as possible. It was also made for screens only 640 pixels across - you could not even expect an 800 pixel screen at the time.

The design went live in Autumn 1997, and was designed, conservatively, for Netscape 2.0 (Netscape 3.0 had been released some two years earlier in 1995). We got a mass of complaints immediately from University House, and we had to re-engineer it to work on Netscape 1.0, the '93 model. Many people in administration were on Netscape 1.0, and were angry when it didn't work. To be fair, this was probably because at the time, they had to use the worst computers in the whole University, and it was probably good that the first web site was made to work on absolutely anything with a web browser at all on it.

If you click on the image, you can go through to a working version of the site. It will have some links that don't work on your browser; this is because the "Image Map" mechanism that Netscape 1 used for some image links was withdrawn some years ago.

The website stayed in place as it was until early 1999, when it was updated by a colleague, Claire Beegan, who was employed on a temporary contract for that job. My commitments with Learning Technology meant that I could only take an advisory role in further development. The updated site was handed over to the publicity department and remained, with updates and some cosmetic changes for another 7 years.