In February 2010 we celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of our website. Time for a look back:

Our first webpage in 1995 was green and very long. There were some pictures and even some blinking text. SOS was the first and for a while the only Australian printing company to come up in a yahoo search (this was PG, pre-Google).

The website was mostly informational, describing services and offering tips and tricks on how to best deal with the complicated art of printing.

 We hosted our own web server and our own mail services. We encouraged customers to send us files, until one customer sent us a 700 page training manual as a postscript file with a size of over 50 MB. Our service provider Magnadata was down for half a day and we bought a Jaz Drive for that customer.

Our next page had icons that grew on rollover, thanks to some Java Script snippets. The page was fairly dynamic, yet organised. It got us our first web design contract, a web page for a computer training company, which we produced within two months including training them in setting up and updating their course schedules in html.

In 1996 Netscape Navigator had the lion's share of the browser market (90%) and Microsoft's Internet Explorer was in version 2.

In 1997 we used 3D look bevelled buttons, at that time a complex, multi-step Photoshop action and the very latest in information design. Sadly we totally overdid it.  

Our logo also did not really benefit from the white halo around it, but the black background was v-cool and survived a few variations. One of them was the word page, extremely fast loading as the front page was just made up of text in bright colours.

 

Our Morse page was fun and simplistic, but neither recognised nor appreciated by anyone, so its online days were numbered. The LED news line was also not popular and hardly anybody made it past the front page.

In 1998 we went back to a standard menu on the left, which seemed to be where everybody was expecting it.

File Transfers was the most important section, our in house FTP server got busier the more companies acquired high speed internet (high speed at that time was often ISDN, 128 k).

Our pre-millenium end of the world page showed our versatility, central to the image was a floppy disk, symbolising digital data. A Floppy Disk was a flexible, magnetic plastic disk that could hold up to 1.44 megabytes of data. We also had Syquest disks, ZIP and Jaz disks and a DAT tape recorder.

We also had four different versions of Microsoft's Word on our computers, as they all displayed and printed documents differently.

 

 

From 2000 on we spent most of our web development time on client sites, with ordering and job tracking systems, reporting, and other database driven functionality that linked in to our internal systems. Our own website was less important and updates were rare.

Our 2003 site was based on a fully in house written content management system, completely database driven and very flexible. The design was fresh, linked to the new logo and this site stayed online for many years.

Functionality was extended, forms, calculators and other useful things added. This front page was our longest lasting.