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Ross built his first website in summer 1995, also the first year Netcraft, then based in Bath, England, began keeping count of website domains. That year's worldwide total was 18,000. By November 2011, domain names totaled 134,568,111. As of June 2025, it totaled 368.4 million. This places Ross's site among the first .000048 of 1 percent of websites constructed.
What did it look like way back when? Well, we had to start somewhere.
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In 2001 Ross redesigned the site using tables in Dreamweaver. But the clumsy table-model gave way to more contemporary box-model using CSS.
Launched July 2005, Ross's next site refresh continued to rely on that much-loved CSS, but included a (Ross thought) more sophisticated newsprint-like background.
During spring semester 2008 Ross and a colleague co-taught the university's first convergence media class. Students pressed for a convergence website using Flash, a then-dominant animation software. .png)
To comply, Ross decided to redesign his own home page using Flash. The new site, representing more work than it was worth, probably, was launched in May.
Who knew Flash would become obsolete? In September 2011 it was time for a home page update. Site design incorporated the then-popular index model, a circus of links aimed at, it was hoped, keeping people from clicking away. As it turned out, people were actually more likely to click away from a busy index home page.
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Simple navigation and photography became a standard. Ross's current home page design, launched in summer 2025, tries to make a now sprawling website (comprising more than 400 pages built over more than 30 years) into something reasonably inviting--if nothing fancy, as Ross is still hand-coding it himself in Dreamweaver. He sticks with what he knows.
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